XU LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL. 



underlie our State ; for, these also will probably be discovered. 

 All I have tried to do, is to show the citizens of our own Com- 

 monwealth the wonderful extinct creatures which lived and 

 loved and were buried in the mud and sand deposits of that part 

 of the ancient American ocean bed now represented by the 

 emerged valleys and mountains of Pennsylvania. 



My thanks are due first to the shades of the great dead, the 

 fathers of American palaeontology. Two of the most distin- 

 guished of them, Conrad and Vanuxein, being Pennsylvanians, 

 I must mention first; then Emmons of New. York, Hitchcock 

 of Massachusetts, David Dale Owen of the West, Worthen of 

 Illinois, Meek of Washington, palaeontologists whom I would 

 gladly worship if I knew of any sacrifice that would reach 

 them and give them pleasure. Perhaps the smoke of one of 

 these volumes, burnt on an altar of unhewn stones "'- on which 

 no hammer had been lifted," might make a sweet savor for 

 their nostrils, of a genuine Solomonic kind. To the greater 

 living any thanks must fall so far beneath the benefits they 

 have bestowed on us as to become inaudible. If Virgil was 

 deified by Rome for the gift of his ^Eneid, Leo Lesquereux 

 should be canonized by Pennsylvania for that poem of poems, 

 the Flora of the Coal. If Homer's Iliad is immortalized, James 

 HalFs Palaeontology of New York, a more sublime epic, will 

 have a more genuine if not a longer immortality. It is danger- 

 ous enough to write the roll of living worthies in any branch 

 of science, lest the order be misplaced, or names be overlooked ; 

 but I cannot go wrong in acknowledging our great indebted- 

 ness to men from whose treasuries of knowledge we are invited 

 to help ourselves to what we need most. The books from 

 which I have drawn the greater part of my matter are Logan's 

 Geology of Canada, and Billing's fossils; Dawsons' Acadian 

 Geology and Devonian Plants; Hitchcock's Ichthyology of 

 Massachusetts ; Emmons', Vanuxem's and Hall's Reports of 

 1842, 1843, on the Second, Third and Fourth districts of New 

 York ; Newberry's two rich volumes of the fossil fish, plants 

 and shells of Ohio; Collett's three volumes of fossils in In-, 

 diana ; Worthen's four volumes of fossils in Illinois; Owen's 

 third volume, giving Cox's and Lyon's fossils of Kentucky ; 

 Safford's Tennessee ; Fontaine's Triassic Flora of Virginia ; Wal- 

 cott's Cambrian fossils in the Bulletins of the U. S. Geological 



