Published in: History of Geology, v. 1, no. 1, 1982, p. 23-28

The Cincinnati “School” of Paleontology

Kenneth E. Caster

(1908-1992)

University of Cincinnati

ABSTRACT

The Cincinnati “School” of Paleontology flourished until near the close of the 19th Century. It was made up mainly of publishing amateurs whose works were viewed with little enthusiasm by the “eastern estab1ishment”. Many of the basic descriptions of the local Ordovician fossils first appeared in these works, most of which were privately printed. S. A. Miller, a local lawyer, was the most notable of these amateurs; his great compendia of American fossils were among the most useful publications of the era, and his privately printed descriptions and those in .the Journal of the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History compare well with the professional productions of the era. Several of the amateurs eventually became distinguished university professors and leaders in the state and federal geological agencies and institutions. Charles Schuchert, Edward O. Ulrich, John H. Nickles and Ray S. Bassler are a few of the local fossil-hunters who went on to higher endeavors, and achieved notable success in paleontology.

The so-called Cincinnati “School” of Paleontology flourished from the 1870's until about 1907, when geology was established at the University of Cincinnati by the appointment of Nevin M. Fenneman as Professor. It was composed of a considerable array of amateur fossil collectors, a large number of whom published fundamental descriptive papers on local fossils in local scientific journals which were both society-sponsored and private enterprises. While today we look back with admiration on these zealous amateur endeavors, this was not the, universal evaluation of the time.

Much of the work of the “Cincinnati School of Publishing Amateurs”, as it was commonly called, was apparently anathema to many of the “Eastern Establishment” who were the professional paleontologists-geologists with university or governmental posts. In retrospect, and at the outset, may I say that these “amateur” descriptive works have stood the test of time about as well as those of the “Establishment”; and some of their productions Here among the most useful ones ever done for our science. There is always an element of anachronism on the frontier, and Cincinnati, founded as “Losantiville” in 1789, was the first great city west of the mountains: a frontier city in the process of evolving, belatedly as compared to the East, a culture and sophistication, despite its early appe1ation of “Porkopolis”. With social evolution, it was soon to become the “Queen City of the Ohio”. Early in Cincinnati's urban development, Dr. Daniel Drake, in 1818, founded the Western Museum Society; he was also the founder of the Medical College of the University of Cincinnati. The Western Museum, on lower Broadway, was the lineal ancestor of the present Museum of Natural History, but in -those days, despite Audubon‘s occasional presence, it was a Museum of both Natural and “Unnatural” history, featuring a money-making installation of Dorfeuille's “Hell” in the basement. This was in the Pre-Civil War epoch, when Mrs. Trollope was single-handedly attempting to introduce “culture” to the reluctant “Porkopolis” barbarians through her “Emporium”, for which she bought goods at retail and tried to find clients for her consequently exorbitantly priced merchandise, genteelly dispensed. Her son Anthony, later of literary fame, is purported to have been employed by the Museum to make sound effects appropriate to Hell. Its creator, Dorfeuille, was a French artist who was a protégé of Mrs. Trollope, and one of his unrolling panoramas the chief ornament of her would-be fashionable salon.

Although by no means a part of the “Cincinnati School”, the aberrant French natural philosopher Constantine Schmaltz Rafinesque (1783-1840) was teaching at Transylvania College in Lexington, Kentucky, when Dr. Drake was pioneering in science in Cincinnati. Rafinesque is best remembered now for the common Cincinnati brachiopod Rafinesquina named in his honor by Hall and Clark in 1892. However, from 1821 to 1839 he wrote several papers on Ordovician fossils and also on Big Bone Lick. His work was mainly conchological. In Philadelphia in 1832 he undertook his own private serial, The Atlantic Journal and Friend of Knowledge, which ran into eight numbers in a single volume and contained an eclectic array of articles, including notes on geology and fossils.

Nor would it be proper to consider Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (184l-1906) as a member of the “Cincinnati School”, although he was raised in Covington, Kentucky, before going to Harvard for his higher education. He became one of the great geologic educators and was famous more for his studies of the Great Ice Age and physical geology than paleontology. Yet his boyhood background of fossil hunting and his love of brachiopods are seen in several of his important works. His doctoral dissertation concerned bilateral symmetry of brachiopods. His second paper, written in 1865, discussed the brachiopods of Anticosti Island. In 1876, he wrote a beautiful monograph of the Ohio Valley Brachiopods for the Kentucky Geological Survey, of which he was then Director. There can be little doubt that Shaler's productive life as an earth-scientist was predicated upon his boyhood collecting of the Ohio Valley Ordovician fossils.

In 1873-74 the Cincinnati Society of Natural History was founded and assumed responsibility for a Museum of Natural History, which was based on the much-augmented residue from the, by then, moribund Western Museum. In the middle 1930's, when I first knew the Museum, it was being removed from it original quarters on lower Broadway, a rat-infested, roof-leaking shambles of a place. It was translated to the garage-coach-house of the Ohio Mechanics Institute on the Central Parkway. The existence of the Museum was very precarious, and most of the collections, acquired during more than a century, were in storage. I was elected a Trustee of the Museum in this period of translocation and thus know intimately the struggle for existence that went on. At the blackest moment, the publisher of the Cincinnati Enquirer, Roger Ferger, headed a drive to “Save the Museum of Natural History” and enlisted the interest and resources of many civic groups and leaders of the industrial community. Among the latter, no one was more valuable, for both interest and moneys, than Fred Geier of what was then the Cincinnati Milling Machine (now Cincinnati Milacron). The Geier family interest and generosity has continued, and the Museum has had broad community support ever since. A site for a new museum edifice was donated by the city in Eden Park, and stage by stage, the present Museum constructed, and funds secured for a paid staff and operating expenses. At the low point, the Museum on the Parkway was kept afloat for many years by the voluntary services of its director, Ralph Dury, and his--by no means plentiful--family funds. He was the son of Charles Dury, a long-time director of the museum. Long before this time, the original ambitious scientific publication plans of the early years of the Cincinnati Society of Natural History had been effectively abandoned, both for lack of funds and articles.

The Journal of the Cincinnati Society of Natural History was launched in 1878, and the first 30 years of the publication cover the era with which I am mainly concerned here. Much of the descriptive paleontology of the “Cincinnati School” appeared in this periodical. During this era there were at least two other short-lived paleontologic serials privately launched, and several impressive paleontologic books independently published.

The eastern disdain for these efforts is now hard to understand. Perhaps it was because the earth science “Establishment” east of the mountains was so close in time to its own humble “amateur” beginnings that it wished to forget them, or possibly the western repetition of the process was viewed as redundant.

Geology was, after all, the last of the great natural sciences to be formalized - first in Europe, and then in the erstwhile colonies of America. The founders of geology were of necessity men of other professional bents. Geology grew out of the observations of “amateurs” and curiosity-collectors, the makers of “cabinets”. They were lawyers, theologians, philosophers, medical doctors, etc., just as were the publishing “amateurs” of Cincinnati.

One of the manifestations of the intellectual ferment of Cincinnati during these times was the establishment in 1864, of the now great Lloyd Library. John Uri Lloyd was a manufacturer of homeopathic medicines, primarily of vegetable origin. Although the Lloyd collection was, and is, mainly botanical, it also had impressive holdings in all fields of science, and is still one of our valued resources for the early period of science. I mention this only to indicate that specialized library resources were available here at an early date, and in no sense were the Cincinnati amateurs working in a vacuum. Since departments of natural history were slow to develop in the first colleges in Kentucky and “the Ohio Country”, there was no body of professionals to draw upon for expertise or to do the basic descriptive work on either extant biota or the fossil record.

Out here in the “West”, universities had not yet been established, although there did exist in Ohio and nearby Indiana several liberal arts colleges, such as Denison, Hanover, Earlham, Antioch, Otterbein and Miami “University”, as well as many' professional schools, especially of Law and Medicine. The University of' Cincinnati seal bears the misleading founding date of 1819. That was when Daniel Drake's school of medicine (“Cincinnati College”) was established. Only much later was it amalgamated into the University, which had grown out of the McMicken College of Liberal Arts. This college assumed the title “university” about the time it moved in 1879 from its hillside home on lower Clifton Avenue to the hilltop piece of virgin forest known as Burnet Woods, where its core still resides. In the pre-university era most professions in this area were dominated by people who were self-taught, or had been the products of apprenticeship. The great body of local fossil collectors then were as they now are from these walks of life, including many ''blue collar” workers. But the “publishing amateurs” were for the most part from a considerably higher stratum of culture. Some were college men, but seldom with Eastern education; they were, for example, medical doctors, teachers) lawyers, successful businessmen, or bankers. But none of them had initially any professional academic or governmental connections in geology or paleontology (although they were soon to attain them, formal credentials or no!).

Our East, like Europe in the formative days of geology, saw little prospect of “light” coming out of the unaccredited ranks of the West. Yet how very wrong they both were!

Eastern attitude toward the “publishing amateurs” of Cincinnati is exemplified by the prejudice of Dr. Henry Shaler Williams, of. Cornell University, the Yale-educated scion of an Ithaca banking family. I have the report of this bad opinion from Professor Gilbert Dennison Harris of Cornell, my old professor of paleontology, and Williams' former student. It was an evaluation which Harris, in the 1930's, did not share, and doubtfully ever did. For one thing, Harris was not quite “Establishment”, since he had only a baccalaureate degree, in an association of Ph.D.'s . His world renown in Tertiary paleontology certainly came from his own efforts and association with W. H. Dall at the Smithsonian and not from formal training. One of his heroes, right after American Tertiary pioneers Samuel G. Horton and Timothy Abbot Conrad, was Thomas Heminway Aldrich. Some of Aldrich's publications on Tertiary mollusca appeared in early numbers of the Journal of the Cincinnati Society of Natural History.

Harris said that Williams was especially disdainful of the works of S. A. Miller, greatest of the Cincinnati amateurs. “Yet”, said Harris, “Miller's great North American Geology and Paleontology was always on Williams' desk, and on the desk of every other paleontologist of the land!” Harris recounted these things when I was invited in 1935, to become the Curator of the Paleontology Museum of the University of Cincinnati.

Harris had great respect for private enterprise, for he had been privately “publishing” (sometimes actually making) the Bulletins of American Paleontology since 1895 and Paleontographica Americana since 1916. He was obviously in rapport with the “publishing amateurs” of Cincinnati and their several private publishing enterprises. He, too, was a prodigious collector of fossils, with a host of amateur-collector friends across the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. (Harris' collections, library and publications are now part of the Paleontological Research Institution which he founded, in 1932, when nearing retirement from Cornell University.)

A partial explanation of the disdain for the works of the Cincinnati describers of fossils lay in the general reaction to descriptive work which had dominated the natural sciences since Linnaeus and before. It is a reaction that is still very much with us! Williams belonged to the then small group of American paleontologists who were trying to build upon the descriptive data and turn it into a higher expression of science, as they viewed it. Species describing, per se, was no longer an adequate scientific objective. They were of the opinion that most of the descriptive work was done. Phylogeny, evolution, ontogeny were where the action ought to be. Williams was an evolutionist and the father of facieology (really paleoecology), although he seldom receives the credit. The use (and misuse) of' fossils in stratigraphic correlation interested him more than biologic form. (See his 1914 paper on the Recurrent Tropidoleptus zones in the Upper Devonian.)

In other words, the endeavors of the “Cincinnati School” seemed belated and ill-timed to Easterners and foreigners in the forefront of paleontology. The great describers were elderly or dead by then. T. A. Conrad began describing Tertiary mollusca in 1830 and finished in 1870. James Hall undertook the great Paleontology of New York in 1843 and was already into his sixth tome when the Cincinnati Journal began. (Incidentally, if ever there was an “amateur” in paleontology who through his own efforts became a professional, it was Jimmy Hall!)

It didn't help the paleontologic reputation of the new Cincinnati Journal, which first appeared in 1878, when the second of two articles on local fossils by “Professor” Albert Gallatin Wetherby came in for a scathing review. The first article was a classified listing of the local fossils, co-authored with John Micleborough. In his second paper “Professor” Wetherby (“teacher” in the local schools in 1875-77; “Professor” in 1978-80; “Professor at the University of Cincinnati”, 1885; thereafter, “Secretary to the American and European Investment Corporation”, according to the Cincinnati Directories) described “a new family and genus of Lower Silurian Crustacea” from the Cincinnati strata (presumably the Corryville beds) and dwelt upon its aberrant nature. This was the rare fossil, Enoploura. In the 1880 volume of the prestigious Geological Magazine, Henry Woodward, of the British Museum of Natural History, went out of his way to denounce ''Professor” Wetherby for his lack of perspicacity in his assignment of the fossil to the Crustacea. It belonged, according to Woodward, to a new group of “cystoid” echinoderms for which he was creating the family “Anomalocystidae” (=Anomalocystitidea), based on the genus Anomalocystis, whose name bespeaks an unusual nature. Woodward’s criticism in no wise deterred “Professor” Wetherby, who continued to publish papers, mainly on echinoderms, in the Journal for the next decade.

This strange group of early echinoderms was eventually to require its own echinodermal class, the Carpoidea of Otto Jaekel. At any rate, they were hardly more echinodermal, in the usual sense of the word, than crustaceans! Years later, the French paleontologist Chauvel was to speak of the carpoids as being so strange as almost to bespeak an extra-terrestrial origin. Wetherby wasn't doing too badly In recent years, Richard Jefferies, also of the British Museum, has been energetically attempting' to make Enoploura and its kind (the mitrate Carpoids), the oldest Chordates, with their own class, the Calcichordata. So far, he has met with little success, I might add. (Over my dead body!--for I too have been engaged in mitrate study for nearly 30 years and have my own peculiar, and heretical, view about them!)

In the first 20 volumes of the Cincinnati Journal (1878-1906) more than 75 paleontologic papers appeared. They covered the gamut from protozoans to mastodons and giant beavers, problematics and plants, and ranging in age from the Late Cambrian, St. Peter Sandstone, to the Cenozoic. The main attention was, of course, to the richly fossiliferous rocks of the Cincinnati Hills. In these papers the larger part of the basic morphologic data were presented and bi-nomens established. Echinoderms and bryozoans received greatest attention at this stage. The most famous, and certainly first studied, group of the local fossils was the trilobites. The commonest of these were named by Easterners, working on New York State's equivalent-age rocks before the “Cincinnati School” began its endeavors. The brachiopods, especially, received considerable local attention. At a considerably later date, they were critically re-examined and many new species were described. The principal contributor to this re-evaluation was A. F. Foerste, a high school physics teacher in Dayton, Ohio, who had earned a Ph.D. in Geology-Paleontology at Harvard and thus was hardly an “amateur”.

Lawyer Samuel Almond Miller was the dean of the publishing amateurs and scientific collectors of fossils in Cincinnati. His collection, like his publications, ranged widely through Paleozoic paleontology, but he was also one of the most prolific describers of Cincinnatian fossils in the seventies and eighties. Miller craved a comprehensive view of his paleontology and geology and determined to share the fruits of his self-education with others. In 1877, he privately published his 253 page American Paleozoic Fossils: a catalogue of the genera and species, with the names of authors, dates, places of publication, groups of rocks in which they are found, and the etymology and significance of the words, and an introduction devoted to the stratigraphical geology of the Paleozoic rocks. This publication also advertised his private Cincinnati Quarterly Journal of Science, which had been published for the years 1874 and 1875 (at $3 a year) and was “devoted principally to matters of Natural History in the vicinity of Cincinnati,” adding that “it contains original descriptions, with illustrations, of a great many fossils.” In the same advertising section, Fred Braun and Co. (the Western Naturalist's Agency) offered fossil and mineral collections to schools and colleges. The fossil collections were of all ages, 1000 species and varieties for $200; 200 for $25. Such bargains helped to establish the fame of Cincinnati's beautiful Ordovician fossils.

Miller's 1889 revision of his 1877 catalogue, entitled North American Geology and Paleontology for the Use of Amateurs, Students and Scientists contained 793 pages and was enhanced by many woodcuts. It was probably the most used volume on American paleontology ever compiled, and it certainly was the most ambitious private publication in the discipline.

Miller's great collection of paleontologic and geologic literature and fossils was left by will to the University of Cincinnati upon his death in 1897 and is one of the treasures of the Geology Department's library and museum. Although he died some 20 years before geology was established at the University, a natural history museum existed. The Geology Department eventually received far more of the Miller fossil collection that was at first believed, especially many thousands of his type specimens. Unfortunately, Miller's law practice suffered in his old age, and the several “panics” of that period had so depleted his resources that he was living in his office, addicted to drink. The story, as I had it from Walter Bucher, “Miller often cadged a quarter from an advocate across the hall to buy a shot of bourbon.” When this became known, a “northern source” supplied the friendly lawyer with a subsidy sufficient to satisfy Miller's thirst; however, the lender was enjoined to select a fossil as security for every quarter, and always a “type specimen”! The loan of considerable proportions before Miller's demise, was never repaid; and virtually all of the fossils in his collection labelled “type” ended up at that “northern source”: the Walker Museum in Chicago! Happily for the University of Cincinnati, Miller was a poor custodian of his riches, and Michael S. Chappars, Curator of our Geology Museum, was in 1936 able to identify in our holdings hundreds of Miller's types--which he had neglected to label “type”. The Miller library is intact and, despite its richness in early literature, most exasperating to use, for Miller had bound it into volumes, the only criterion of organization being enough papers of the same page-dimensions to make a conveniently sized volume. His interests ranged widely and most volumes are highly eclectic.

In 1878, in the first number of the Journal of the Cincinnati Society of Natural History, Edward Oscar Ulrich, who was hired as a janitor of the Society in 1873, started his long career in paleontology by publishing two articles on local fossils. In the second volume, published in 1879, Ulrich began his life-long focus on fossil Bryozoa. In 1880 he privately printed a “Catalogue of Cincinnati Fossils” and in 1886 he initiated, with high hopes, his personally produced Contributions to American Paleontology, of which only the first number of volume 1 was to appear. Meanwhile, Ulrich undertook a 170 page survey of “American Paleozoic Bryozoa,” illustrated by his own engravings. This material was published from 1882 to 1884 as volumes 5-7 in the Journal. Bassler's obituary of Ulrich (1945, G.S.A. Proc., 1944, pp. 331-52) traces his career in detail and was written with great affection.

Early associates of Miller and Ulrich, who also collected fossils and published their findings, were the remarkable James family of book-sellers. Uriah Pierson James, the patriarch, began his publication career in 1846 (he was then 35) by describing a new starfish from the “Blue Limestone” of Cincinnati. It was 15 years before we again hear of him; in 1871 he privately printed and published a l4-page “Catalogue of Lower Silurian fossils, Cincinnati group .... “, with a 4-page addendum in 1873. By this time his son, Joseph Francis, who had been a clerk in the family bookstore, was following in his father’s footsteps as a publishing amateur. But he soon became a “professional”. In 1887 father and son wrote more than 50 pages, with illustrations, on “Monticuliporid Corals of the Cincinnati Group” (i.e., “stony bryozoans”) in volumes 10 and 11 of the Cincinnati Journal. The son had far broader interests in earth sciences than his father. He was, for example, one of the pioneers in the study of trace fossils (“fucoids”), which were the subject of his first paper in 1884 (Journal, volume 7). His interests also extended to physical geology, botany, and zoology. In 1887 he wrote on “the geology and topology of Cincinnati”. It is clear from the manner in which he was progressively identified in his papers that he was in the process of becoming a professional: in the 1887 paper he was entitled “Professor”; in 1890 his name was followed by “M.S.” and “affiliated with the U.S. Geological Survey”; in 1893 his name carried “F.G.S.A.” (Fellow of the Geological Society of America) and the identification: “Assistant Geologist of the U.S.G.S.” He was apparently the first of the “Cincinnati School” to gain professional status and wider affiliations. He continued to publish occasionally in the Journal of the Cincinnati Society of Natural History until his death in 1897, although in his later years he published extensively in eastern journals as well.

The writing of paleontologic (and geologic) manuals, compendia, indices, catalogues and bibliographies was a peculiarly Cincinnatian endeavor. J. F. James was a true son in this respect, and in 1892-96 there appeared in the Natural History Society Journal “A Manual of the Paleontology of the Cincinnati Group,” in seven parts. This contained also descriptions of some new species.

There was, however, another intriguing earlier Cincinnatian whom the Cincinnati directory for 1879 listed as “Geologist”. This was Charles Brian Dyer of “Mt. Harrison, Ohio”. Dyer coauthored a paper with S. A. Miller, in the first number of the Journal of the Cincinnati Society of Natural History, which described Cincinnatian (and Niagaran) fossils, and he again wrote with Miller (1878) descriptive papers in the latter's private Contributions to Paleontology (no. 2). Thus his name as coauthor is appended to a wide array of local fossils: jellyfish (Conularia) , sponges, starfish, snails, annelids, bryozoans, cyclocystoids and trace fossils (“fucoids”) . So far as is known, his label of “geologist” was a self-award for the directory.

E. O. Ulrich was unique among Cincinnati's early paleontologists in enlisting the assistance and friendship of the Cincinnati youth, thereby changing their lives; they often went on to brilliant professional careers in earth science. Three of these were John M. Nickles, Charles Schuchert and Ray S. Bassler, all of whom worked with Ulrich as collectors or as laborers in his commercial bryozoan thin-section laboratory in Covington, Kentucky; all were associated with him in Washington, as employees of the Federal government.

Throughout his life, Nickles continued to compile, as was typical of the “Cincinnati School”. Bryozoa were his first love, and although he wrote several descriptive papers, his greatest contribution to the paleontologic field was his (and Bassler's) 1900 “Synopsis of American Fossil Bryozoa, including Bibliography and Synonomy” (U.S.G.S. Bull. 173, 663 pp.). Thereafter, Nickles' life was mainly spent in the field of bibliography. His great Bibliography of North American Geology, 1785-1918 (U.S.G.S. Bull. 746) and Index (U.S.G.S. Bull. 747) were followed by two decade supplements (1919-28, U.S.G.S. Bull. 823; 1929-39, U.S.G.S. Bull. 937). The work was continued for the years 1940-49 (2 vols., U.S.G.S. Bull. 1049) under a Geological Survey Committee, inspired by Nickles' endeavors; there having been biennial volumes in the Geological Survey Bulletins series after the publication of his last decade volume.

Ray S. Bassler was the first of the Cincinnati amateurs to have been trained at the University of Cincinnati (but before there was a Department of Geology there). He worked during most of his high school years and all through his University years as a half-day assistant to Ulrich in his Covington laboratory. This was a labor of love, rather than economic necessity, since Bassler's father was head of the Abbe Observatory, the local Federal Weather Bureau. The Bassler family lived in the Observatory, in fashionable Clifton. This is somewhat more than a mile north of his high school and the University campus. Bassler told me of that walk to school and the wonderful expanse of newly excavated Cincinnatian Corryville shales along what is now “fraternity row” of Clifton Avenue in front of the University. He said that many a morning he filled his pockets with trilobites while on his way to school and was often late.

Bassler was fortunate in having an understanding high school principal, George W. Harper, a knowledgeable collector of fossils. He put him in contact with “Eddie” Ulrich of Covington; and, when Bassler was a senior in high school, Harper asked him to be a junior author with him for a privately produced (1896) “Catalogue of the fossils of the Trenton and Cincinnati Periods occurring in the vicinity of Cincinnati, Ohio.” This was Bassler's initiation into paleontologic publication. When Ulrich moved to the Washington scene and Federal employment in 1900, Bassler soon followed, in March of 1901, to continue working with him on bryozoans, thus abandoning the University of Cincinnati in his senior year. However, he managed again to work out a part-time study program, with the Columbian University (now George Washington University), which enabled him to graduate, by transfer of credits, from the University of Cincinnati in 1902, the same year that he began work for the Federal Civil Service. Bassler went on for a “first” among the “Cincinnati School”, “an earned doctorate, at “George Washington”, where he was to continue as a Professor for the rest of his life. (See Caster, 1965, obituary of Bassler, in G.S.A. Bull. 76, pp. 167-174.) There is no need here to review Bassler's enormous contribution to our knowledge of the Bryozoa; it was probably the greatest of any single individual. But he too invested an enormous effort in bibliographic and synoptic work; witness his splendid, and imposing, 2-volume Bibliographic Index of American Ordovician and Silurian Fossils (1915, U.S. Nat. Mus. Bull. 92, 1521 pp.).

Charles Schuchert was probably the least formally educated of any American paleontologist. He had, so far as known, no more than six years of formal elementary education. His father was a cabinetmaker on the Cincinnati riverfront. Schuchert was, of course, eventually to emerge as the greatest product of the “Cincinnati School”, becoming a distinguished Yale professor of paleontology and historical-stratigraphic geology. He began his publishing career (1889) with a listing of the Devonian fossils occurring in the Oriskany sandstone of Maryland. But by 1890, in his second paper, his interest in Brachiopoda was manifest. Unlike the previously reported members of the “Cincinnati School”, Charles Schuchert never published locally. He had attracted the attention of the great James Hall in Albany and was soon attuned to a wider panorama. Schuchert, via Albany, had preceded Ulrich to the Washington scene, and was by 1895 already prominent among students of the Brachiopoda. In 1897 Schuchert established the paradigm followed by the other Cincinnatian bibliographic compilers with his Synopsis of Fossil Brachiopoda, including Bibliography and Synonomy (U.S.G.S. Bull. 97, 464 pp.). This was to be followed years later (1929)”by the great work in Fossilium Catalogus on the Brachiopoda, written with the help of his Yale assistant, Clara M. LeVene. Despite his fame as a brachiopodologist, Schuchert's most imposing independent work was in the realm of Echinodermata systematics: his 1915 Revision of Paleozoic Stelleroidea with special Reference to North American Asteroidea (U.S. Nat. Mus. Bull. 88, 311 pp., 38 pls.).

The “Cincinnati School” was predominantly a long succession of fossil collectors. This hobby, popular since Cincinnati's earliest days, was inevitable in a place so richly endowed with fine Ordovician specimens. During my first year in town, I received a telephone call from an unknown resident offering some specimens to the University Museum. Would I please come and look them over? I went and was met by a patriarch of a man, who confessed to more than ninety years. About to leave his cottage and move into an old age home, he was disposing of his possessions. What he was offering us was several splendidly scrim-shawed whale teeth that went back to a New England great-grandfather, a “sea-captain”. I explained that, old and interesting as they were, they were not “fossils”, nor appropriate for the Geology Museum. After I had volubly admired them, he ended by presenting them to me personally--and they are still among my prized possessions. When I was already in my car, he came toddling to his white fence with something dangling on a chain. “Have ye got a woman?” he asked; when my reply was affirmative, he said, “Maybe she would like this?” It was a splendid enrolled Flexicalymene trilobite from the local rocks, black as Jet, free turning on a gold rod that passed through the axis of enrollment, and it was affixed to a twisted gold horseshoe. He explained that it was his fondest and oldest remembrance of his mother, who wore it around her neck, although it was her father's watch-fob originally. That grandfather was one of the first settlers in Cincinnati in the late 18th century (Cincinnati was founded in 1789); obviously, from the outset, fossils had intrigued the pioneers. (Alas! the pioneer trilobite was stolen, along with all my wife's jewelry, when our house was robbed in Brazil!)

Aside from the publishing notables that have held our attention thus far, the most discriminating of their associates in the Cincinnati area made outstanding collections of fossils, many of which are now cherished possessions of the Geology Museum at the University of Cincinnati. There was a long tradition among local collectors, continued today by the Dry Dredgers, our local fossil-hunting society, of keeping labels with their specimens, and above all recording place and horizon whence their prizes came⁽¹⁾. Furthermore, from the 1870's on, most serious collectors were purposeful; they realized the scientific worth of their endeavors, and, when not publishing themselves, welcomed the opportunity to help with the paleontologic research of the professionals⁽²⁾. Their type specimens, almost without exception, and eventually their residuary estate of fossils, commonly went to the University of Cincinnati, or some neighboring institution. We have already mentioned the S. A. Miller Collection, rich in type materials.

(1)  Although John H. Clarke in his 1923 biography of James Hall attributes to him this term “Dry Dredgers” for fossil-hunters, the first printed use that I know of is the title of an article by Charles Schuchert, in Science (n.s. vol. 2, 1895): “Dry-dredging the Mississippian sea.” This was three years before James Hall's death, and no doubt reflects his Hall association.

(2)  There has not been a paper written on local fossils by myself or my students at the University of Cincinnati in the last 45 years in which Dry Dredger contributions of materials have not had a significant role, sometimes a dominant one.

Another very fine collection was that of Charles Faber, a local manufacturer of leather belting, who published several papers on local fossils with S. A. Miller. It came to the University also, under the conditions that hopefully insured a full-time Curator of the University's fossil trove, together with a perpetual fund for paleontologic publication. Carroll Lane Fenton was the first of the Faber Curators. (I came to Cincinnati in 1936 in that position.) Charles Schlemmer, a local plumber, presented another splendid collection, as did Ernst Vaupel, a boyhood chum of Charles Schuchert, and shirt-maker by profession. The Vaupel collections, both at Yale and Cincinnati, contain superb materials, meticulously documented.

Vaupel was the only local survivor of the classical age of Cincinnati collectors when I arrived on the scene. He became a fine friend and went with me on many a field excursion to demonstrate old collecting sites, especially those in the old “Hill Quarries” or along railroads and abandoned canals in Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. On one such occasion, when he was probably

80 years old, he went collecting with me and my wife. She happened to look back along the railroad cut at Versailles, Indiana, only to see Vaupel with legs waving in the air, his head and shoulders buried in a muddy ditch. When we pulled him out, dirty and bleeding, he eventually remarked, “I always have said I wanted to die on an outcrop. That was close!” In a few minutes he was back fossil-collecting on the Richmond cliff from which he had fallen. Alas, he was to die by tumbling from a stepladder while washing the kitchen ceiling for his wife! His great collection was given to us not long before his death, carefully packed in tissue, and contained in dozens of shirt boxes.

Dr. George Twitchell, a medical man and early contributor to the “Cincinnati Society Natural History Journal (mainly on Recent microbiota), left his large and excellent collection of local stony Bryozoans and his thin-section file to the Geology Department. Henry Probasco, one of the “industrial tycoons” of early Cincinnati, a wholesale hardware merchant and owner of one of the famed “castles” in exclusive Clifton, was another collector. His superbly arranged cabinet of fossils, with printed labels, is also a prized possession of our Museum. (For those of you new to Cincinnati, the splendid Tyler-Davidson fountain, in Fountain Square in the heart of downtown, was given to the city by Henry Probasco in memory of his public-spirited and admired brother-in-law.) After the establishment of Geology at the University of Cincinnati (1907-- it is one year older than I am), most of the publishing in local paleontology has emanated from the University. But it was after 1936, the year of my arrival in Cincinnati, that an opportunity was afforded for paleontology to thrive in the Geology Department; henceforth publication concerning local fossils began to match in volume that of the era of the “Publishing Amateurs” of the “Cincinnati School”. Fortunately, fossil collecting is still a widespread hobby and many fine collections make us hopeful that the tradition will continue.