Warp.] THE EMMONS COLLECTION. 275 
The Potomac Formation, Dr. T. Nelson Dale, of Williams College, Wil- 
liamstown, Massachusetts, approached me and asked if I was also inter- 
ested in the flora of the Trias. When I informed him that I had been 
studying it for the last five years and had prepared an extended paper 
on it which I hoped sometime to publish, he volunteered the startling 
information that all of Dr. Ebenezer Emmons’s types from the North 
Carolina coal fields were deposited at Williams College and were under 
his charge. 
As it had been so frequently and confidently stated that these types 
were lost or destroyed during the war, this piece of news came as a 
revelation. Jasked him if it would be possible to obtain access to 
them in order to have them reexamined by Professor Fontaine and a 
final report published upon them, and he said that so far as his author- 
ity went he would be glad to cooperate in securing this result. 
He said he had compared a number of them with the published fig- 
ures and was certain that a portion at least of the type specimens 
were in the collection, and he presumed all. Indeed, he thought there 
was considerable material that had not been published. 
I immediately wrote to Professor Fontaine and asked him if he 
would like to undertake to overhaul the collection and prepare a 
report. His interest was of course great and he consented to do so. 
He corresponded directly with Dr. Dale, and after some delay the 
desired result was brought about. In a letter to Professor Fontaine, 
dated May 10, 1894, Dr. Dale says: ; 
Dear Sir: I have at last found time to look over Emmons’s fossil plants. The 
specimens from which the figures reproduced by you in your monograph on the Older 
Mesozoic were drawn are mostly here. I have identified the following: 
Your pl. 48, figs. 6 and 8 (the latter slightly damaged, the former, 2 specimens). 
Pl. 49, fig. 6. 
Pl. 51, fig 1 (marked Volizia acutifolia) and figs. 2, 3. 
Pl. 52, fig. 6. 
Pl. 58, figs. 4, 5 (of the latter a better specimen). 
Pl. 54, figs. 4, 7. 
There is one marked ‘“‘impression of trunk of cycad’’ somewhat like your pl. 
52, fig. 5. 
Also the following: Cycadites longifolius, Calamites, Lepacyclotes with Walchia 
diffusus, Walchia variabilis. A Sphenopteris egyptiaca better than pl. 48, fig. 8. 
Besides these there is a drawer 30 by 16 by 23 inches, full of smaller apoeiiens: 
many of them with his labels still attached. 
Should you chance to be in New England sometime I would ‘be pleased to give 
you every facility for studying the specimens, but I ought to be advised. beforehand 
lest I should chance to be out of town. 
Yours, respectfully, T. NELson Date. 
The pressure of other work, however, delayed attention to this impor- 
tant matter for a period of over three years. I had become specially 
interested in the. subject of cycads, and as several supposed cycads had 
been reported from the North Carolina coal fields by Dr. Emmons, I 
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