900 THE AMERICAN NATURALIST: FVO XXXII. 
Canada, besides the graptolites, the development of Crinoids 
and Cystids revealed a strange aspect of fossil life, repeated in 
the Niagara limestone of New York. 
In Barrande’s Système Silurien, a great work, exhaustively 
executed, Hall found strongly accentuated the fact of faunas 
and colonies, and the impression made by that work indorsed 
his own views and deepened them. Hall was not a thorough- 
going evolutionist, and Barrande’s feelings about fixed types 
effected a permanent lodgment in Hall’s zoological creed. 
Hall’s sanity, his reasonableness and restraint, is shown in his 
paleontological work, and reflects the sort of clarity of mind 
which distinguished his geological research. His literary in- 
stinct appears in his names also, which are pronounceable, well 
composed, and significant. His diagnosis of species and genera 
seemed remarkably correct. It was much later than his first 
work that he yielded to the solicitations of the hour and poured 
out species and genera so devotedly ; sometimes it is to be 
feared with a desire to obscure previous publications. Hall's 
diagnosis of Eurypterus, for instance, was admirable, though 
indisputably much of its perspicacity was injected from the 
careful comparative studies of Whitfield with Limulus. Agassiz, 
as is well known, coincided with these views. 
The idiosyncrasies of Conrad, his unstudiousness, his careless- 
ness and laconic methods, despite his genius in recognizing 
form, placed Hall’s work at a surpassing distance beyond him. 
The appearance of the first two volumes of the Paleontology of 
New York, which were distinctively and, so to speak, indigenously 
Hall’s work, marked a real epoch in scientific publication in 
this country. The wave of excitement spread abroad, and the 
keenest expectation was excited by the possibilities of a field 
of research, almost untouched, from which light might be ex- 
pected upon the problems of life, new and brighter than that 
afforded in the similar areas of Europe. 
When de Verneuil assured Hall of the striking specific con- 
trasts, as well as the specific identities with those of Europe, 
amongst the fossils he was displaying to the scientific world, 
the path seemed opened for indefinite additions to the sum of 
knowledge in paleontology. 
