Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/711

Rh ancient flora. He extracted from the face of the cliff a bell-shaped stone, the lower part of which was more than three feet in diameter and the upper surface about two feet. It was the base of a shaft of a huge tree fern.

In 1854 Mr. Lock wood was called from Gilboa to Key port, N. J., and he took with him a careful drawing of the big fossil. About two years afterward he revisited his haunts in the Schoharie Valley, when with other large fossils he removed the one just described, and presented it to Rutgers College. The moving of this mass—some thirteen hundred pounds—over thirty-seven miles of the Catskills was not without incidents. The young student was much annoyed, at points where the horses were fed, by inquiries about the "big stun." His paleontological lecture upon the rock as being the base of a wonderful plant rather puzzled the country people, as at Durham, N, Y., where the most rational theory that could be conceived to account for his proceedings was that the rock contained gold. This theory won respect for the geologist, who was now viewed in the light of a mining explorer.

Mr. Lockwood prepared drawings of his fossil plants, intending to send them to Hugh Miller, when the news came of the Scotch geologist's death. The fossils were studied and described by Sir J. William Dawson, of Montreal, and the descriptions with plates were published. The chief fossil received the name Caulopteris Lockwoodi, meaning Lockwood's "wing-shafted" tree fern. Each stem was a symmetrical column of sixty feet in height, with vast fronds like far outreaching wings.

Upon invitation of the late Prof. George H. Cook, then the New Jersey State Geologist, Mr. Lockwood presented the fossil to Rutgers College, with a speech, at a meeting of the Students' Natural History Society, in commencement week.

Mr. Lockwood reasoned out, without aid from books, to the conclusion that, though resembling the Carboniferous fossils, these Devonian plants must have antedated them; and that, though the rocks containing them were superficial in the Catskills, they probably extended, in Pennsylvania, beneath the coal beds. His interest in geology became from this time very lively.

In his new field in Monmouth County, New Jersey, Mr. Lockwood's attention was directed to the Cretaceous deposits known as the marl beds. They exhibited a new phase of organic remains in their vertebrate fossils, attesting to the former presence in the region of a race of immense reptiles quite as wonderful in their way as the Devonian cryptogams of the Catskills. During one of the visits of Inspection which he was in the habit of making to the clay bluffs near Keyport, he observed what appeared to be the surface of a broken bone, black and friable.