The writer has never made the trilobites his special subjects for study as he has the brachiopods, and therefore felt that he should not try to bring to light merely the material things that Beecher had so well wrought out. It seemed at first an impossible task to find the specialist and friend to do Beecher justice, but as the years have passed, one of Beecher's students, always especially interested in trilobites, has grown into a full appreciation of their structures and significance, and to him has fallen the continuation of his master's work. If in the following pages he departs here and there from the accepted interpretation and the results of others, it is because his scientific training, in desiring to see with his own eyes the structures as they are, has led him to accept only those interpretations that are based on tangible evidence as he understands such. Furthermore, in seeking the relationship of the trilobites to the rest of the Arthropoda, his wide study of material and literature, checked up by the ontogeny of fossil and recent forms, has led him in places from the beaten path of supposedly ascertained phylogenies. His results, however, have been won through a detailed study of the interrelations of the Arthropoda, starting from the fact that the Trilobita are chronogenetically the oldest and most primitive. The trilobites are held by him to be the most simple, generalized, ancient Crustacea known, and the progenitors, directly and indirectly, of all Arthropoda. It is now twenty-six years since Professor Beecher began his publications on the class Trilobita, and in commemoration of him and his work, Professor Percy E. Raymond of Harvard University presents this memoir, to bring to fruition the studies and teachings of his honored guide. It has been with Professor Raymond a labor of love, and it is for the writer of this foreword a long-desired memorial to the man to whose position in the Museum and University he had the privilege of succeeding. Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. PREFACE. The primary object of this memoir is, as has been stated by Professor Schuchert, to rescue from oblivion the results of the last few years of Professor Beecher's investigations on the ventral anatomy of trilobites. Since he left his data in the form of drawings and photographs, without even rough notes, it became necessary, in order to write a text to accompany the plates, to restudy the entire subject. Under these circumstances, it seemed best to include all that is known about the appendages of trilobites, thus bringing together a summary of present information on the subject.