THE PALA ONTROLO GIG ME COED CalONS i © hain 
GEOLOGICAL DEPARTMENT OF THE AMERICAN 
MUSE UME; OF aN Ad WROAIE el Sa Ove 
THE geological department of the American Museum of 
Natural History completed in December, 1901, the publication 
of a catalogue of the types and figured specimens in its posses- 
sion, by R. P. Whitfield, assisted by the author of the present 
note. This work has been under way for several years, and in 
its published form makes up a book of more than five hundred 
pages, forming Volume XI of the Suadletin of the Museum. This 
is one of the oldest departments of the museum, and its chief 
possession is the great James Hall collection, which was acquired 
in 1875, and which placed it at once in the front rank of 
American museums containing similar material. This collection 
will always be the standard reference series for all workers in 
North American Paleozoic paleontology, since it contains a very 
large proportion of the specimens described and figured by Pro- 
fessor Hall in the course of his work on the Paleontology of New 
York up to the time of the purchase of the collection by the 
American Museum. _From time to time the department has 
received other collections, through exchange and other means, 
but, with the exception of the Holmes collection, they contained 
few types at the time of their acquisition. Most of the “figured 
” 
specimens’”’ in the collections of the department are those which 
were identified, re-described, illustrated, and published by Pro- 
fessor Hall in the Paleontology of New York, and therefore they 
have almost the dignity and value of types. : 
Of the specimens described and illustrated in the quarto 
volumes of the Paleontology of New York, the Museum possesses 
two-thirds of those in Volume I, covering the Cambrian and 
Lower Silurian systems; nearly eight-tenths of those in Volume 
Read before the Geological Society of America at Rochester, N. Y., January 2, 
1902. 
252 
