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
Footnote 98:
Featherstonhaugh, J. D., Am. Geol., 3, 220, 1889.
Footnote 99:
Whitney, Mineral Wealth of the United States, pp. 248–250.
Footnote 100:
Foster and Whitney, 31st Cong., 1st session, House Doc. 69, pp. 13–14,
1850.
Footnote 101:
First Annual Rept. U. S. Geol. Survey, p. 4.
Footnote 102:
Wheeler, Report 3d Internat’l Geog. Cong., p. 492, 1885.
Footnote 103:
The views of the writer on “natural monopolies” in the Government
service are set forth in an address delivered at the centennial
celebration of the U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, April 5, 1916.
(See Science, vol. 43, pp. 659–665, May 12, 1916.)
Footnote 104:
For correspondence on this subject, see Minnesota Geol. Survey, Eighth
Ann. Rept., 1880, p. 173.
Footnote 105:
Owen, D. D., 30th Cong., 1st sess., Senate Doc. No. 57, p. 7, 1848.
Footnote 106:
This essential difference between present-day requirements and the
needs of earlier generations has been discussed by W. C. Mendenhall,
the geologist in charge of the Land Classification Board of the
Geological Survey: Proceedings 2d Pan-American Sci. Cong., 1915–16, 3,
761.
VI
ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF VERTEBRATE PALEONTOLOGY
By RICHARD SWANN LULL
_Introduction._
Unlike its sister science of Invertebrate Paleontology, which has been
approached so largely from the viewpoint of stratigraphic geology, that
of the vertebrates is essentially a biologic science, having its
inception in the masterly work of Cuvier, who is also to be regarded as
the founder of comparative anatomy. For long decades, vertebrate
paleontology was simply a branch of comparative anatomy or morphology in
that it dealt almost exclusively with the form and other peculiarities
of fossil bones and teeth, often in a more or less fragmentary
condition, very little or no attention being paid to any other system of
the creature’s anatomy. Distribution both in space and in time was
recorded, but the value of vertebrates in stratigraphy was still to be
appreciated and has hardly yet come into its own. It is readily seen,
therefore, that the two departments of paleontology did not enlist the
same workers or even the same type of investigators, for while the two
sciences have much in common and should have more, the vertebratist
must, above all else, be a morphologist, with a keen appreciation of
form, and a mind capable of retaining endless structural details and of
visualizing as a whole what may be known only in part. The initial work
of the brilliant Cuvier set so high a standard of preparedness and
mental equipment that as a consequence, the number of those engaged in
vertebrate research has never been large as compared with the workers in
some other branches of science, but the results achieved by the few who
have consecrated their research to the fossil vertebrates has been in
the main of a high order.
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