Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from A Dictionary of the Fossils of Pennsylvania and Neighboring States: Named in the Reports and Catalogues of the Survey
Descriptions of fossils without figures are of no use to the unlearned. The Greek and Latin names given to fossils mean nothing to those who know only the English language. Costly illustrated books scattered about in libraries. Public and private, are inaccessible to and unattainable by the people of a State. Even those who reside in cities know not where to find them. If by accident they now and then encounter one, they are not trained to its use, and can only in a helpless, listless mood of mind turn over pages written mostly in an unknown tongue, and plates of figures arranged in no comprehensible order, a confused jumble of unrelated objects, with no names attached to them, and their descriptions only to be found, by reference to an index, in some distant part of the book.
Geologists complain that people at large take no interest in fossils. Geologists have only themselves to blame for the fact, for they furnish the people with no helps for understanding fossils, - no primers or handbooks of primary instruction Names mean nothing without pictures; and a picture tells nothing unless some explanation of it is subjoined. Even ex perts grow weary of the laborious references which they are compelled to make from figures grouped on plates at the end of a volume, to names and descriptions printed, indexed and tabled in different parts of the text. So inconvenient and wasteful a fashion of publication could only be justified by its cheapness; but considering the great first cost of drawing and printing the figures. The perfection of the art of photographic electrotyping, and the saving of space by indenting the cuts, there seems to be no excuse of this sort now for retaining the old style; and it is fatal to the only right service of such books, their easy consultation.
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