VERTEBRATE PALEONTOLOGY 



cms animal of immense size found in America. It was 

 because of the form of the molar teeth that Peale said of 

 it: "If this animal was indeed carnivorous, which I 

 believe cannot be doubted, though we may as philoso- 

 phers regret it, as men we cannot but thank Heaven that 

 its whole generation is probably extinct. ' ' 



With the work of these men as a beginning, it is not 

 strange that the more conspicuous Pleistocene fossils of 

 the East should have attracted the attention of many 

 subsequent writers in the first part of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury, nor that the early papers to appear in the Journal 

 should pertain to proboscideans or to the huge edentate 

 ground-sloths and the aberrant zeuglodons whose bones 

 frequently came to light. Therefore a number of men 

 such as Koch, both Sillimans, J. C. Warren, and others 

 made these forms their chief concern. 



Fossil Footprints. Among the early writers who con- 

 cerned themselves with these greater fossils was Edward 

 Hitchcock, sometime president of Amherst College, and 

 a geologist of high repute among his contemporaries. 

 Hitchcock is, however, better and more widely known as 

 the pioneer worker on a series of phenomena displayed 

 as in no other place in the region in which he made his 

 home. These are fossil footprints impressed upon the 

 Triassic rocks of the Connecticut valley. It was in the 

 Journal for the year 1836 (29, 307-340) that Hitchcock 

 first called attention to the footmarks, although they had 

 been known and discussed popularly for a number of 

 years previous. James Deane, of Greenfield, was per- 

 haps the first to appreciate the scientific interest of these 

 phenomena, but deeming his own qualifications insuffi- 

 cient properly to describe them, he brought them to the 

 attention of Hitchcock, and the interest of the latter 

 never waned until his death in 1864. Hitchcock wrote 

 paper after paper, publishing many of them in the Jour- 

 nal, again in his Final Report on the Geology of Massa- 

 chusetts (1841), and later in quarto works, one in the 

 Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 

 and the two others under the authority of the Common- 

 wealth, the Ichnology in 1858, and the Supplement in 

 1865, the last being a posthumous work edited by his son, 

 Charles H. Hitchcock. 



