Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/442

410 survey, then arranged, and in progress of arrangement, in the old State Hall on State Street, which building had been assigned for that purpose by the Legislature of 1840. He was appointed to this position by Governor Seward and assumed charge of the collections in the latter part of 1842. On the same occasion on which this recommendation was made it was also recommended by the staff that the work in agriculture and paleontology which had been left unfinished should be assigned to Dr. Emmons and Prof. Hall.

In the spring of 1843 Governor Bouck directed Dr. Emmons to investigate the agricultural resources of the State; and the paleontology was placed under the charge of Prof. Hall, while Dr. Emmons still retained his position as custodian of the collections of the survey until 1845. The five volumes of his report on the Agriculture of New York appeared in 1846, 1849, 1851, and 1854. The first was devoted to a "topographical sketch of the State, climate and temperature, agricultural geology, the Taconic System, and the soils of New York"; the second to analyses of grains and other vegetable products; the third and fourth, one consisting of text, the other of plates, to cultivated fruits; and the fifth to injurious insects. This fifth volume has been severely criticised, but it should be remembered that the writer to whom its preparation was intrusted, not being versed in entomology, could only compile from the best sources at his command, at a time when the science was in its infancy, and comparatively little was known of the insects of the State. The many illustrations, which are well colored in the larger portion of the edition, were mainly drawn from Nature, and in some of the orders, as in Coleoptera and Hemiptera, have a degree of excellence which is rarely surpassed even at the present day.

About the time the third volume came from the press he was appointed State Geologist of North Carolina. In his new field he made further important contributions to the advance of American geology. In the coal measures of the Deep and Dan Rivers he discovered a grand Triassic flora, and a fauna that included among many ancient vertebrates the Dromatherium sylvestre, the oldest mammal yet found anywhere in the world. His description of the new red sandstone flora of North Carolina proved so valuable that twenty years after his death the United States Geological Survey reproduced all the plates and descriptions given by him in the sixth part of his American Geology. Three volumes of North Carolina reports were published by him. One on the Geology of the Midland Counties was issued in 1856; a volume devoted to the Agriculture of the Eastern Counties, with descriptions of the fossils of the marl beds, in 1858; and a second part of his report on the agriculture of the State, "containing a