Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/271

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TIMOTHY ABBOTT CONRAD.
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all interest in every undertaking. “A period of moping would usually end in his writing some verses which nobody would praise, and this seemed sufficiently to nettle him, to rouse him thoroughly, and he would become again enthusiastic in the matter of shells and fossils.”

In 1837 Conrad was appointed Geologist of the State of New York, and after resigning the position remained as paleontologist of the survey until 1842. “He prepared official reports on the fossils collected by the United States exploring expedition under Wilkes; by Lieutenant Lynch's expedition to the Dead Sea; by the Mexican Boundary Survey, and some of the surveys for a railroad route to the Pacific undertaken under the supervision of the War Department. Many papers were written by him on the Tertiary and Cretaceous geology and paleontology of the eastern United States and published in the American Journal of Science, the Bulletin of the National Institution, the American Journal of Conchology, Kerr's Geological Report on North America, and other publications. A list of Conrad's papers, which covers most of those bearing on paleontological topics, may be found in Miscellaneous Publications of the United States Geological Survey of the Territories, No. 10; Bibliography of North American Invertebrate Paleontology, by Drs. C. A. White and H. Alleyne Nicholson—Washington, Interior Department, 1878. It contains a hundred and twelve titles” (Dall).

In 1832 Conrad published Fossil Shells of the Tertiary Formations of North America. Illustrated by Figures drawn on Stone from Nature. Vol. I. Philadelphia, 1832. It is dedicated to Samuel George Morton, M. D. In 1838 Conrad published Fossils of the Tertiary Formations of the United States. Illustrated by Figures drawn from Nature. Philadelphia: J. Dobson. These are known generally as the Eocene and Miocene volumes, and both, as original editions, are extremely rare. They have recently been reprinted in facsimile: the former by Mr. G. D. Harris of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C.; and the latter by the Wagner Free Institute, under the editorial supervision of William H. Dall, of the National Museum. In his introduction Prof. Dall says: “Students of the American Miocene and the later Tertiary deposits of the New World are well aware of the importance to them of Conrad's work, usually referred to by the title of The Medial Tertiary. There can be little doubt that the scarcity of this work and its predecessor, the Eocene volume, is the chief cause of the delay in investigating our rich and interesting Tertiary beds.”

Prof. Dall, in considering Conrad as a paleontologist, remark as follows: “Mr. Conrad had several peculiarities; he wrote his letters and labels frequently on all sorts of scraps of paper, gen-