THE 



AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SCIENCE 



[FOURTH SERIES.] 



Art. XXXIII. — Elaboration of the Fossil Cycads in the Yale 

 Museum ; by Lester F. Ward. (With Plates II-IV.) 



The visitor to the Peabody Museum of Yale University, if 

 he penetrates to the basement of that building, finds himself 

 literally "in the woods," — a petrified forest of Mesozoic 

 cycads. A few of the finest specimens may be seen in the 

 exhibition halls on the second floor, and many more will be 

 ultimately placed there, but at present the bulk of the collec- 

 tion is undergoing elaboration below, in close association with 

 the gigantic dinosaur bones that have made the names of Marsh 

 and of Yale so justly celebrated in the history of science. In a 

 very literal sense, cycads are to the vegetable kingdom what 

 dinosaurs are to the animal, each representing the culmination 

 in Mesozoic time of the ruling dynasties in the life of that age. 

 Professor Marsh saw this, and, as the last act of his life, had 

 the sagacity to make the Yale Museum for all time the Mecca 

 for all who shall wish to gain a realizing sense of the fauna and 

 flora of America in a period now forever closed. 



It has chanced to be my fortune or misfortune to be situated, as 

 it were, in the storm track of cycadean investigation on this con- 

 tinent, and upon me has devolved the duty of roughly blocking 

 out the general line of study of that wonderful extinct vegetation 

 that has been coming to light in this country in such rich pro- 

 fusion. Science demands a terminology and a nomenclature, and 

 whatever may be said of the superficial character of all systematic 

 work, it is now true and always has been true, nay, it must 

 always be a need, that the systematist precede the structuralist 

 and provide him with a language and a framework for his finer 

 researches. This is all I profess to have attempted, and not 



Am. Jour. Sci. — Fourth Series, Vol. X, No. 59. — November, 1900. 

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