Students of trilobites have always wanted specimens to be delivered to them weathered out of the rock by nature and revealing the ventral anatomy without further work than the collecting, but the wish has never been fulfilled. In the Utica black shales, near Rome, New York, there was finally discovered in 1892 a layer less than ten millimeters thick, bearing hundreds of _Triarthrus becki_ with most of the ventral anatomy intact. The collector's first inkling that such were present in the Utica formation came to him in a chance find in 1884, and for eight years he sought off and on for the stratum whence this specimen came. His long search was finally rewarded by the discovery of the bed, and lo! here were to be had, in golden color, prostrate specimens with the breathing and crawling legs and the long and beautifully curved feeling organs all replaced by iron pyrites. Fool's gold in this case helped to make a palæontologic paradise. The bed contained not only such specimens of _Triarthrus becki_, but also, though more rarely, of _Cryptolithus tessellatus_ and exceptionally of _Acidaspis trentonensis_. This important discovery, which has figured so largely in unraveling the evolution of the Crustacea and even has a bearing on that of most of the Arthropoda, was made by Mr. W. S. Valiant, then curator of the Museum of Rutgers College. There were, however, great material difficulties to overcome before the specimens revealed themselves with all of their information exposed for study. No surgeon was needed, but a worker knowing the great scientific value of what was hidden, and with endless patience and marked skill in preparation of fossils. Much could be revealed with the hammer, because specimens were fairly abundant. A chance fracture at times showed considerable portions, often both antennæ entire, and more rarely the limbs protruding beyond the test, but the entire detail of any one limb or the variation between the limbs of the head, thorax, and tail was the problem to be solved. No man ever loved a knotty problem more than Charles E. Beecher. Any new puzzle tempted him, and this one of _Triarthrus becki_ interested him most of all and kept him busy for years. From the summer of 1893. when he quarried out two tons of the pay stratum at Rome, until his death in 1904, his time was devoted in the main to its solution by preparing these trilobites and learning their anatomical significance.