No. 32.] 
3 
ed, and on this ground distinctly, I was told by Gov. Bouck that my 
salary would be reduced from $1,800 to $1,500, because I would 
have no travelling expenses. 
The first year was necessarily devoted to getting together species from 
all the successive formations, in order to carry out the plan proposed, of 
illustrating the entire work in one volume with one hundred plates. 
In that time, from June, 1843, to March, 1844, I had put into the 
hands of the engravers, materials for about seventy plates, in litho- 
graphy and wood engraving. The cursory examinations of this year 
sufficed to show me that a very small proportion of the species were 
to be found in the State collection, and that the work as then con- 
templated, would present but a meagre idea of the subject, and much 
more time would be necessary in order to give it anything like a 
desirable completeness. The short time allowed for its preparation 
permitted only the most common and conspicuous objects to be 
obtained and illustrated, and I foresaw that a work finished under 
such circumstances, would neither be creditable to myself nor worthy 
of the State of New-York. I represented this condition of things to 
Governor Eouck as well as I was able to do at that time, telling him 
that the work would be a very unsatisfactory one, not creditable to 
the State, and one that must soon be superceded if published on such 
a plan. 
Governor Bouck gave me permission to go on with the work in 
ray own way, telling me that I must trust to a future Legislature for 
remuneration; that he did not feel authorised to pay beyond the 
salary of one year as had been jjreviously determined. 
It would have been easy to prepare a volume of 100 plates of the 
most conspicuous fossils, taken from the whole series of rocks within 
the State. It would have required comparatively little time; it 
would have been temporarily satisfactory to the people at large; but 
in a few years the numerous collectors throughout the State would 
have had in their collections twice as many species from each of the 
rocks and groups, as were there published, and not finding them 
illustrated in the palaeontology of the State, they would have justly 
complained, — the work would have fallen into discredit, and your 
palaeontologist disgraced. It was, therefore, not possible for me to 
hesitate in the choice, between publishing a work of this description 
