38 Forty-fourth Report on the State Museum, 



approval and direction of the Trustees, should be suspended 

 indefinitely, while new work has been taken up and carried on to 

 completion. 



So long as the work on these groups of organisms can not be 

 published, the subjects remain in mind, and it is quite impossible 

 to drop them from ccmsideration, and take up other work as if 

 these had been completed or had never been commenced. 



This condition prevents the conception, planning or forwarding 

 of other work in the same direction, and for which there is great 

 need in our education ; and this is moreover a kind of work which 

 the State of New York could easily supply for the benefit of 

 her educators and those who are to be educated. 



It is scarcely possible to estimate the loss to the reputatioji 

 and prestige of the Museum and to the state which has come 

 from the actual suspension of work in these branches for so 

 many years ; a loss which the most earnest devotion to that or 

 similar work or publication, in the future, can never repair. 

 Without dwelling further on this unhappy condition of certain 

 departments of work relating to the Palaeontology, I would earn- 

 estly ask for some positive and final action ; even an adverse 

 decision will be preferable to suspense. 



The early months of the year were devoted to the supervision 

 of the printing of Part I of volume VIII; the Brachiopoda 

 Inarticulata. The discussions upon the genera of this order 

 together with the descriptions of new species constitute the first 

 185 pages of the volume. 



The scope of this volume is much wider than any of the pre- 

 ceding volumes on the Palaeontology of New York, embracing, as 

 proposed, a revision of the genera of the Palaeozoic Brachiopoda, 

 and therefore treating of the most numerous and most character- 

 istic forms, as well as the most useful for the identification and 

 determination of the comparative age of the older geological 

 formations of the continent. To accomplish such a work requires 

 the investigation of material from widely separated localities and 

 from all the recognized subdivisions of the entire geological 

 column. It has therefore been necessary to go outside of the 

 limits of the state to obtain material for study, both from 

 the older Palaeozoic formations, which are but very meagerly rep- 

 resented in the collections of the State Museum, and also from 

 the later Palaeozoic strata which do not exist within the limits of 



