XXXI 1 



PROCEEDINGS OF THE CENTENARY MEETING. 



Zoological Garden, has brought to our doors the wonders of the living world ; 

 and who, in the American Museum of Natural History in the Central Park, has 



made to live again the strange monsters of a past world. I have pleasure in 

 calling upon Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn to speak to us upon the culti 

 vation by the Academy of the science of paleontology. 



Dr. Osborn: 



In addressing the Mayor of Philadelphia, the President and members of The 

 Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and the Toastmaster, I rise with 

 the greatest pleasure to the toast of "The Academy of Natural Sciences of Phila- 

 delphia and its Relation to the Development of Paleontology in America." 



I bring greetings to the Academy from the scientific institutions of New 

 York City, the American Museum of Natural History, and Columbia University, 

 as well as an expression of the debt that all of us constantly feel to the men who 

 have worked within these walls and have developed that division of the biology 



of the past known as paleontology. 



This country has ever afforded peculiar opportunities for the development of 



this branch of science which was founded in France by the genius of Cuvier. 

 There were first the Pleistocene fossils discovered in the Eastern and Middle 

 States, some of which Thomas Jefferson considered of greater interest than the 

 political developments in the stirring period of 1808. Then came our Western 

 Territory, an arid region constituting an unknown continent. The first explorers 

 of the Mauvaises Terres brought back a revelation of the existence of wonderful 

 records of the world's life. Fortunately for science as early as 1851 these frag- 

 ments were brought to Philadelphia, and to the hands of one who lives immortal 

 in the history of American science and the world's science, Dr. Joseph Leidy. 

 Never was there a greater opportunity and never was there a man more ready 

 to grasp it than that quiet, unpretentious, unassuming, wonderfully gifted ob- 

 server of nature. It is particularly interesting to review his work, which was 

 written in the exact spirit of Cuvier, and to see his long record of direct observa- 

 tion of the entire extinct fauna, not only of the East but especially of the great 

 western territories,— to find how permanent that work is, how well it stands the 

 test of time, how accurate his descriptions, how perfect his figures and illustra- 

 tions, and how, even today, they form the best standards for all the work which 

 has been done since. So I think it may fairly and truly be said, without any 

 exaggeration incidental to this historic moment, that Joseph Leidy was the 

 founder of the paleontology of the vertebrates in America. After a continuous 

 series of epoch-making papers and contributions which he was in the habit of 

 contributing year after year to meeting after meeting— he brought his work to 

 a climax in 1869 when he published his great monograph, The Extinct Mammalian 

 Fauna of Nebraska and Dakota, in the Journal of the Academy. That work still 

 ranks in its breadth and its accuracy as one of the finest contributions that has 

 been made to vertebrate paleontology in this country. In fact, Leidy started 



