No. l8.] TRIASSIC FISHES OF CONNECTICUT. 



39 



IV. CONCERNING EARLIER INVESTIGATION OF 

 NORTH AMERICAN TRIASSIC FISHES. 



"In den Wissenschaften ist es hochst verdienstlich, das unzulangliche 

 Wahre, was die Alten schon besessen, aufzusuchen und waiter zu fiihren." 



— Goethe. 



American vertebrate paleontology may be said to have begun 

 with President Thomas Jefferson's description of fossil elephant 

 remains from Virginia^ in 1787, and the bones of Megalonyx, 

 afterwards named M. jeifersoni, a dozen years later.^ One has 

 to turn back a little more than a century earlier, however, for the 

 first published figure of an American fossil, this being Ecphora 

 quadricostata from the Maryland Miocene.' The earliest records 

 of all relating to the discovery of fossil vertebrate remains in 

 the western hemisphere date from the time of Hernandez, court 

 physician to Philip II, and other Spanish explorers of the seven- 

 teenth century.* 



We cannot be sure when fossil fishes first began to attract 

 attention in this country, but the earliest notices regarding them 

 in any scientific publication fall within the second decade of the 

 last century, and relate to remains discQvered in the Connecticut 

 Valley region. Several titles are comprised in these early 

 notices, and among their authors occur such names as S. L. 

 Mitchell, B. Silliman the elder, Edward Hitchcock, A. Brong- 

 niart, W. W. Mather, James E. Dekay, and others. Per contra, 



• Notes on the State of Virginia. London, 1787. 



^ A Memoir on the Discovery of certain bones of a Quadruped of the clawed kind 

 in the western parts of Virginia. Trans. Amer. Phil. Soc, 1799, iv, pp. 246-260. 

 Dr. O. P. Hay is authority for the statement that this work is said by C. G. Giebel 

 to have been issued in 1797. 



' Lister, M., Historia sive Synopsis Methodicse Conchyliorum. London, 1685. PI. 

 1059, fig. i=. 



* References to old Spanish works in which these remains are attributed to a race 

 of human giants are given in the second volumes respectively of Cuvier's " Ossemens 

 Fossiles " and Humboldt's " Cosmos." The vulgar interpretation, which is ap- 

 parently common to all primitive society, ancient and modern, finds an apt illustra- 

 tion in the Gigantomachia of classical antiquity. Consult the suggestive article by 

 Dr. Th. Skouphos, in Comptes rendus Cong. Inter. d'Arch., Athens, 1905, pp. 231-236. 

 Also one by E. von Lasaulx on the Geology of the Greeks and the Romans, in 

 Abhandl. bayer. Akad. Wissensch., 1852, vi, pp. 517-566. 



