REPORT OF THE DIRECTOR 1923 119 
western New York region they were put in service for this areal 
¥ survey work, and one after another of these quadrangles, each cover- 
ing an area of about 200 square miles, was surveyed and plotted by 
Mr Luther. In a few of these the writer joined, but for the most 
part Mr Luther did the work single handed. ‘The field was not 
one of complicated structure but the distinctions between the rock 
formations required caution and mature judgment, especially in the 
ease’ of the great formations of the Upper Devonian which slowly 
eraduate westward to Lake Erie into quite distinct faunistic phases. 
The survey work thus ‘done was reliable, and Mr Luther covered 
a larger area of this record on the scale-maps of 1 inch to the mile 
than has been done by any other geological surveyor connected with 
this organization. Equally important to the science were the dis- 
coveries of new fossils that were turned up in connection with this 
work. Mr Luther was a careful and excellent collector and our 
present knowledge of the extensive and extraordinary Upper 
Devonian faunas of New York which have been described in the 
paleontological reports of this survey, is in sharp contrast to the 
poverty of what we knew when he began his work. Dana Luther’s 
labors were an impressive illustration of the fact that a natural 
common sense, good judgment and painstaking patience, governed 
by a genuine and intense love of his work, are a better equipment 
than the average technical training in a younger man who lacks 
those virtues. 
Naples and the surrounding country had been regarded by the 
older geologists as singularly forbidding and unproductive territory 
in the remains of extinct life, but that old desert has now been made 
to blossom like the rose since the days when Luther began his work, 
and its bare rocks have produced a fauna of unequalled interest. 
Among his notable discoveries was the finding of the great tree 
trunk in the Portage or lower division of the Upper Devonian in 
the rocks of Naples—the Protolepidodendron. This was one of the 
earliest of all the trees of the world, a lepidodendrid, which now 
stands, both the original and the restoration, in the State Museum. 
It had floated out from the land into the marine waters of that 
ancient time and was located by its finder by a mere thin line of 
coaly substance on the edge of a rock ledge in one of the Naples 
ravines. A part of the overlying rock was lifted and the nature of 
the fossil disclosed. Then the concealed trunk, constantly enlarging 
in diameter, was followed back straight into the cliff under a pigsty 
and into a pasture with an increasing overload until the bulging root 
