Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, December 1898: Volume LIV, No. 2, December 1898Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, December 1898: Volume LIV, No. 2, December 1898
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
In 1868 he was appointed State Geologist for New Hampshire, and
spent ten years in the survey of that State. The results of his
work there were published in three large quarto volumes, with a
folio atlas of maps, profiles, and sections. The rocks described
consist principally of crystalline schists and marine igneous
ejections. The geology of New Hampshire is of peculiar importance,
because the situation of the State is such that a correct knowledge
of its rocks promotes the understanding of many obscure terranes in
the adjacent regions of Maine, Quebec, Vermont, and Massachusetts.
Professor Hitchcock's report of the survey may justly be styled his
chief work. The part best studied relates to the White Mountains
and the Ammonoosuc mining district. Connected with the survey was
the maintenance of a meteorological station throughout the year on
the summit of Mount Washington. Daily statements of the weather
conditions of this station during the winter of 1870-'71 were sent
by telegraph to the principal newspapers, and called out much
interest--before the United States Signal Service began its weather
predictions.
The catalogue of Professor Hitchcock's publications comprises more
than one hundred and fifty titles of papers, reports, and books.
Perhaps the earliest thorough study represented among them was that
of the fossil footmarks. The first of the published papers on this
subject related to the tracks of animals in alluvial clay, and was
published in the American Journal of Science in 1855. For several
years after this he assisted his father in arranging the museum and
compiling tables for the Ichnology. He made a complete catalogue
descriptive of the more than twenty thousand individual impressions
preserved in the Appleton Cabinet, which was printed, with
descriptions of a few new species of footmarks, in the Supplement
to the Ichnology of Massachusetts, edited by him after the death of
his father in 1865. Although circumstances have prevented him from
paying much attention to ichnology in later years, he has prepared
several papers on the subject, the most important of which was one on
the Recent Progress of Ichnology, which was read before the Boston
Society of Natural History about twelve years ago. In it the ichnites
were carefully catalogued anew and classified in the light of our
knowledge of the numerous dinosaurs of the West; and the results
of some studies of the slabs exhumed at Wethersfield, Connecticut,
are well known. The list of the Connecticut footmarks was increased
from one hundred and nineteen in the Ichnology to one hundred and
seventy; and facts were cited to show that the _Grallator_, the
three-toed animal most allied to birds, possessed a caudal appendage
of a reptilian nature. The Trias of New Jersey had been found to
illustrate new features in the _Otozoum_, whose tracks are often
ornithic in aspect. A comparison of the features of the Triassic
skeletons described by Marsh from Connecticut (_Anchisaurus_) shows
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