486 



REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1004. 



nut senl you any fossils. Of course, I should not set up mylirhited knowledge in 

 opposition, bu1 I certainly have forms unknown to me and not occurring in Carbon- 

 iferous rocks of Missouri which T examined. 



Under these conditions it is difficult to understand why Hawn 

 should have later entered into a partnership with Swallow for the 

 working up of the collections and the publication of the results, and 

 it is perhaps not to be wondered at that Meek should have denounced 

 the proceeding somewhat harshly in a paper prepared under the joint 

 auspices of himself and Hayden and read before the Albany Institute 

 on March )> of that year. Hawn, in a subsequent letter to Meek, excused 

 himself on the ground that Meek's letters had led him to believe that 

 he had abandoned the investigation for want of time or for want of 

 confidence in the final result, and that consequently he brought the 

 matter to the attention of Swallow with the urgent request that the 

 collections be worked up immediately, and at the same time notified 



him of Meek's suggestion regarding their 

 Permian nature. Swallow himself wrote a 

 very conciliatory note to Meek, which seems, 

 however, to have been far from healing the 

 breach between the parties most concerned. 

 The facts of the matter, so far as they can 

 be made out, both from the publications and 

 the letters now in the archives of the Smith- 

 sonian Institution, seem to show that, be- 

 yond question, Meek was the first to recog- 

 nize the possible Permian nature of the 

 fossils in question; that he so notified Hawn, 

 and supposed the matter was so arranged 

 that he could work the materials up at his 

 leisure. In the meantime Hawn, as sug- 

 gested in his letter, thinking that Meek had laid the matter aside, 

 brought it to Swallow's attention, who published the matter with 

 almost unseemly haste in the Transactions," as well as in the local 

 newspapers of the day. In addition, he gave the substance of the dis- 

 covery in a letter to Dana, dated February 16, which was published as 

 an appendix of the American Journal of Science for March of that 

 same year/' 



On the 8th of March of this same year B. F. Shumard announced, 

 at the Academy of Sciences at St. Louis, that certain fossils which his 



a Swallow's paper begins with the following statement, which illustrates his 

 anxiety to claim priority in a discovery, the importance of which was greatly over- 

 estimated: "In presenting the following paper to the scientific world, we feel it 

 incumbent upon ourselves to state that it has been prepared in great haste, in the 

 midst of other pressing duties," etc. 



*> Apparently inserted at the last moment before the number was bound up, and 

 too late to be noted in the table of contents. 



Fir;. 69.— Benjamin Franklin 

 Shumard. 



