A century of science in America : $b with special reference to the American Journal of Science, 1818-1918
History
A century of science in America : $b with special reference to the American Journal of Science, 1818-1918
American journal of science; Science -- United States -- History
The dominant invertebrate paleontologist of this period was of course
James Hall, who described about 5000 species of American Paleozoic
fossils. He also built up the New York State Museum, while around his
private collections of fossils have been developed the American Museum
of Natural History in New York City and the Walker Museum at the
University of Chicago. In his most important laboratory of paleontology
at Albany, there have been trained either wholly or in part the
following paleontologists: F. B. Meek, C. A. White, R. P. Whitfield, C.
D. Walcott, C. E. Beecher, John M. Clarke, and Charles Schuchert.
In Canada, through the work of the Geological Survey of the Dominion,
came the paleontologists Elkanah Billings and, later on, J. F.
Whiteaves. The “father of Canadian paleontology,” Sir William Dawson,
who developed independently, was active in all branches of the science
and did much to unravel the geology of eastern Canada. No organism has
been more discussed and more often rejected and accepted as a fossil
than his “dawn animal of Canada,” _Eozoon canadense_, first described in
1865. His son, George M. Dawson, was one of the directors of the
Geological Survey of Canada. Finally the extensive paleontology of the
Cambrian of Canada was worked out by another self-made paleontologist,
G. F. Matthew.
_Paleobotany._—American paleobotany was developed during this, the
fourth period, through the state and national surveys, first in Leo
Lesquereux, a Swiss student induced by Agassiz to come to America, and
in J. S. Newberry. The second generation of paleobotanists is
represented by Lester F. Ward and W. N. Fontaine, and the third
generation, the present workers, includes F. H. Knowlton, David White,
Arthur Hollick, and E. W. Berry. A new line of paleobotanical work, the
histology of woody but pseudomorphous remains, has been developed by G.
R. Wieland.
The grander results of the study of paleontology during the evolutionary
period may be summed up with the conclusions of Marsh:
“One of the main characteristics of this epoch is the belief that all
life, living and extinct, has been evolved from simple forms. Another
prominent feature is the accepted fact of the great antiquity of the
human race. These are quite sufficient to distinguish this period
sharply from those that preceded it.”
Charles Darwin’s work at once aroused attention, and brought about in
scientific thought a revolution which “has influenced paleontology as
extensively as any other department of science.... In the [previous
period] species were represented independently by parallel lines; in
the present period, they are indicated by dependent, branching lines.
The former was the analytic, the latter is the synthetic period.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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