6 The American Geologist. J^^v- ^^'>*- 
far-reaching and striking of his deductions in his later work 
when his mind had turned chiefly to problems of biogenesis are 
known to his friends to be the result of tireless acquisition of 
material, and the focussing of light from every source. In 
some quarters, his methods unknown, their results were not 
accepted ; they were regarded as startling, as iconoclastic and 
even unreliable. 
It is well that here a word be said in detail as to what his 
preparation was before a publication appeared . In our mu- 
tual association in Albany we undertook a study of the onto- 
geny of certain brachiopods from the Upper Siluric at Wal- 
dron. The materials for this study were the fine washings 
from some tons of specimens brought to Albany by the mu- 
seum's collectors. Herein lay every stage of developn^ent of 
these shells. Night after night for a whole winter we sorted 
oiit this material until we estimated that fifty thousand im- 
mature brachiopods had been selected and arranged in onto- 
genic series. His studies of the larval and development phases 
of the brachiopods and trilobites were chieflv based on etch- 
ings from the limestones of the Helderberg and Canandaigua 
lake. These too were numbered by thousands. When he 
published the anatomy of the trilobite Triarthrus. an English 
author wrote me "confidentially" to know if it was to be trust- 
ed. A continental paleontologist with a single sandstone cast 
of a trilobite's ventral surface, destructively attacked his work, 
intimating that it was a dream, a castle in Spain. He did not 
know that Beecher had a thousand specimens back of him to 
prove his work and a hundred preparations which for delicacy 
and exactitude have had no equal . 
In 1889 Mr. Beecher was invited by professor ^Marsh to 
go to New Haven in the capacity of assistant in the Peabody 
Museum in charge of the invertebrate fossils. ^Matters in 
Albany were not just at that time in form to present a counter 
attraction. Professor Hall was undergoing one of the period- 
ical "investigations" with which he was frequently favored. 
Sometimes these were precipitated by unsympathetic interests 
in the state legislature, but this time by a personal hostility at 
the head of the Regents of the University, ^^'hatovcr their 
source, however, there was never but one issue to these in- 
quiries and that the full justification of the man and his work. 
