Report of the President. 1 5 



material for Volume VIII, on the Brachiopoda, was prepared for publication 

 prior to 1876, hence a large proportion of the specimens used for illustrations 

 are to be found in the American Museum, especially of those used for the 

 plates bearing the name of R. P. Whitfield. 



"Most of the species in the volumes above mentioned were first published 

 in the Regents' Reports on the Condition of the State Cabinet (or State 

 Museum, as it is now called), but material from other States than New York 

 was also used in these reports, and the American Museum has the fossils 

 from the Wisconsin-Minnesota Cambrian beds described and figured in the 

 sixteenth Report; the Niagara material from Waldron, Ind., published in 

 the twenty-eighth Report; and the graptolites and the Wisconsin Niagara 

 species given in the twentieth Report. The Trenton fossils from Wisconsin 

 described in the Report of Progress of the Geological Survey of Wisconsin for 

 1861 are here, and the original descriptions have been republished with illus- 

 trations and notes by R. P. Whitfield in the Memoirs of the American Museum 

 of Natural History, Volume I, Part II. The Museum has all the Warsaw 

 fossils from Spergen Hill, Ind., originally published without figures by Hall 

 in the Transactions of the Albany Institute, Volume IV, and republished by 

 Whitfield with figures in Bulletin Am. Mus. Nat. Hist., Vol. I. The collec- 

 tion also includes the type fossils from the Clinton beds at Arisaig, Nova 

 Scotia, described by Hall in Volume V of the Canadian Naturalist and Geolo- 

 gist; many of the Devonian and higher forms described by the same author in 

 the Geology of Iowa and the Supplement to the Iowa Report, the latter being 

 republished with figures, by Whitfield in Mem. Am. Mus. Nat. Hist., Vol. I, 

 Part I; several type specimens of the Dictyospongidas, some of which have 

 been described by Whitfield in the Bulletin of the Am. Mus. Nat. Hist., Vol. 

 I, and others by Hall and Clarke in a Memoir on the Palaeozoic Reticulate 

 Sponges; Hall and Meek's types from the Cretaceous of the Bad Lands of 

 Dakota, Nebraska and Wyoming, described in the Memoirs of the American 

 Academy of Science and Arts, Vol. V; the fruits and seeds from the Eocene 

 beds at Brandon, Vt., described by Lesquereux and published in Hitchcock's 

 Geology of Vermont, and some of the Cephalopoda, Gastropoda and Lamelli- 

 branchiata described by Whitfield in his U. S. Geological Survey monographs 

 on the Cretaceous and Tertiary fossils of New Jersey. The Museum also has 

 the Holmes collection, which includes more than two hundred of the speci- 

 mens described and figured in Tuomey and Holmes's Pleiocene Fossils of 

 South Carolina and in Francis S. Holmes's work on the Post-Pleiocene Fossils 

 of South Carolina. The fossils described in the various bulletins and memoirs 

 of the American Museum of Natural History are here as a matter of course. 

 In addition to the republication of certain of Hall's types already mentioned, 

 there have been described and illustrated in the Bulletin a large series of fossils 

 of Chazy and Birdseye age from Fort Cassin, Vt., Beekmantown, N. Y., and 

 other localities on Lake Champlain, and many Cretaceous forms from Beirut, 

 Syria, and from Jamaica, W. I. 



"The term 'type', as employed in the Geological Department of the 

 American Museum, embraces not only the specimens actually used by an 

 author in the original description of a species, but also those specimens which 

 have been used by the same author in the further elucidation of the species in 

 subsequent publications. The types may or may not have been illustrated in 

 connection with the first publication. 'Figured specimen' is the term ap- 

 plied here to the specimens which have been identified with a species by 

 another person- than the author of the species and which have been illustrated 

 in some publication. From the standpoint of the student and investigator, 

 types are the most valuable portion of any collection, and should, therefore, 

 be marked in some conspicuous manner and be preserved with the greatest 



