l (l T/i< American Geologist. Jan. 1891 
Taconic system, he wrote me from Raleigh, North Carolina, the 
— * >tli of November : " I shall wait with anxiety the reception of 
your promised paper. You have already, so colonel Jewett tells 
me, stirred up the trio, Logan, Hall, and Hunt. The latter took 
the colonel to task a tew days ago for his belief in the Emmonslan 
myth, as it is called by Mr. Lesley, of Philadelphia,'' 
In a letter dated Raleigh, January 23, 1861, he says : "I am 
under the highest obligations to 3011 for the decided part you have 
taken in the question respecting the Taconic system Mr. 
Meek was afraid of making a call at my house lest Hall might 
hear of it. (Meek was assistant of Mr. J. Hall from 1852 to 
1858. and during his long stay at Albany, he did not call once at 
Dr. Emmons' house, because when taken as an assistant by Mr. 
Hall, he agreed that he would have nothing to do with Emmons.) 
.... I always doubted Hall's ability to make out a thing, for I 
found he made many blunders — has made them all along the New 
York Survej', beginning say, with calling the Helderberg lime- 
stone Mountain limestone, etc., etc. He has with great zeal de- 
nounced me in his third volume of the Palaeontology of New York, 
just out, and run his statements to prove the error of the Taconic 
SA'stem over forty pages, I am told. '' (The third volume of the 
Palaeontology of New r York was really published in November, 
1860; several copies were already distributed when Barrande and 
Marcou's joint paper appeared the 24th of December, 1860. at 
Boston. In the American Journal Sri., January, 1861, the edi- 
tor announced that in "the Introduction Professor Hall handles 
with masterly skill the proper classification of the lower horizons 
of life in our planet and that a review of that important chapter 
with the views of Barrande will appear in the next number." But 
that review never appeared ; the distribution of the official volume 
of palaeontology was stopped and the few copies already distributed 
were returned to the author, and Mr Hall suppressed all his state- 
ments designed to prove the error of the Taconic system, recast 
the whole of his Introduction, suppressing the forty pages de- 
nouncing Dr. Emmons, and after three years of hesitations and of 
consultations with Logan and his other associates, he finally dis- 
tributed the volume in May, 1862, without giving one word of his 
so long announced '-proper classification of the lower horizons of 
life in our planet" as he understood it before the publication of 
