Lull — Development of Vertebrate Paleontology. 213 



1870-1880. 



The seventh decade was productive of comparatively 

 few great names in the history of our science, but two, 

 J. A. Ryder and Samuel W. Williston, being notable con- 

 tributors. The former produced but few papers and 

 those between 1877 and 1892, yet they were of note and 

 such was their influence that he is named with Hyatt, 

 Packard, and Cope as one of the founders of the Neo- 

 Lamarckian School of evolutionists in America. Bycler 

 was a particular friend and a colleague of Cope, as they 

 were both concerned with the back-boned animals, while 

 the other two were invertebratists. Ryder wrote on 

 mechanical genesis of tooth forms and on scales of fishes, 

 also on the morphology and evolution of the tails of 

 fishes, cetaceans, and sirenians, and of the other fins of 

 aquatic types. He did, on the other hand, practically no 

 systematic or descriptive work. 



Williston, on the contrary, has had a long and varied 

 career as an investigator and as an educator. Trained 

 at Yale, he prepared for medicine, and much of his teach- 

 ing has been of human anatomy, both at Yale and at the 

 University of Kansas where he served for a number of 

 years as dean of the Medical School. He is also a stu- 

 dent of flies, and as such not only the foremost but indeed 

 almost the only dipterologist in the United States. But 

 it is with his work as a vertebrate paleontologist that we 

 are chiefly concerned, and here again he stands among 

 the foremost. His initial work and training in this 

 department of science were with Marsh, for whom he 

 spent many months in field work, collecting largely in the 

 Niobrara Cretaceous of Kansas. He did, however, no 

 research while with Marsh, owing to the latter 's disin- 

 clination to foster such work on the part of his associates. 

 Williston began his publications in 1878 and has con- 

 tinued them until the present, working mainly with Cre- 

 taceous mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, and pterodactyls. Of 

 late, since his transference to the University of Chicago, 

 where as professor of paleontology and director of the 

 Walker Museum he has served since 1902, his interest has 

 lain mainly among the Paleozoic reptiles and amphibia. 

 Williston 's more notable works are American Permian 

 Vertebrates and Water Reptiles of the Past and Present, 

 wherein he sets forth his views of the phylogenesis and 

 taxonomy of the reptilian class. He is at present at 



