200 Lull — Development of Vertebrate Paleontology. 



be inaugurated as vice-president of the United States, he 

 brought with him to Philadelphia not only his manuscript 

 but the actual fossil bones upon which it was based. 

 Again in 1801 he was greatly interested in the Shawan- 

 gunk mastodon, despite heavy cares of state, and in 1808 

 made part of the executive mansion in Washington serve 

 as a paleontological laboratory, displaying therein for 

 study the bones of proboscideans and their contempora- 

 ries which the Big Bone Lick of Kentucky had produced. 

 Jefferson's work would not, perhaps, have been epoch- 

 making were it not for its unique chronological position 

 in the annals of the science. 



Jefferson was followed by another man — this time one 

 whose diverging lines of interest led him not into the 

 realm of political service, but of art, for Eembrandt 

 Peale possessed an enviable reputation among the early 

 painters of America. Peale published in 1802 an account 

 of the skeleton of the "mammoth," really the mastodon, 

 M. americanus, speaking of it as a nondescript carnivor- 

 ous animal of immense size found in America. It was 

 because of the form of the molar teeth that Peale said of 

 it: "If this animal was indeed carnivorous, which I 

 believe cannot be doubted, though we may as philoso- 

 phers regret it, as men we cannot but thank Heaven that 

 its whole generation is probably extinct. ' ' 



"With the work of these men as a beginning, it is not 

 strange that the more conspicuous Pleistocene fossils of 

 the East should have attracted the attention of many 

 subsequent writers in the first part of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury, nor that the early papers to appear in the Journal 

 should pertain to proboscideans or to the huge edentate 

 ground-sloths and the aberrant zeuglodons whose bones 

 frequently came to light. Therefore a number of men 

 such as Koch, both Sillimans, J. C. Warren, and others 

 made these forms their chief concern. 



Fossil Footprints. — Among the early writers who con- 

 cerned themselves with these greater fossils was Edward 

 Hitchcock, sometime president of Amherst College, and 

 a geologist of high repute among his contemporaries. 

 Hitchcock is, however, better and more widely known as 

 the pioneer worker on a series of phenomena displayed 

 as in no other place in the region in which he made his 

 home. These are fossil footprints impressed upon the 

 Triassic rocks of the Connecticut valley. It was in the 



