| SECOND GEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF PENNSYLVANIA - REPORT OF PROGRESS P. DESCRIPTION OF THE COAL FLORA OF PENNSYLVANIA AND OF THE CARBONIFEROUS FORMATION THROUGHOUT THE UNITED STATES BY LEO LESQUEREUX; ©1879 |
Tables of Contents:
|
All Four Volumes: Scans and Webpage ©George Langford III, 2011 |
| My
acquaintance with the collecting of fossils began as an observer in
about 1945 when my father George Langford, Jr. and grandfather, George
Langford, Sr. were getting ready for a trip to the strip mine spoil
heaps near Joliet, Illinois, starting from our living room in Hinsdale,
Illinois. I did not get another chance to take part in this
activity until Grandfather's first book was published by ESCONI
Associates in 1958, and then only as a mildly interested reader.
I was in graduate school in 1962 when Grandfather's second book came
off the press, and I was in the New Hampshire mountains in 1964 when
Grandfather died suddenly in Chicago, literally in Father's arms. Fast forward many years, during which I began a long career as a metallurgist (not quite literally following in the footsteps of several Langford ancestors) until after Father's death in 1996 after a long life and little illness, after which I inherited a number of books and manuscripts on fossils from Father's and Grandfather's estates. Among the manuscripts was the collection of photographs of fossils collected by Father and Grandfather which Grandfather had put together to commemorate Father's enthusiastic help during 150 days in the field in the later 1930's. There was also the Atlas of sketches of fossils amassed by Leo Lesquereux during his monumental study of fossils associated with the carboniferous formation in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Alabama, Indiana, and elsewhere. This Atlas had been of great value to Grandfather in identifying what he found in the strip mine spoil heaps with Father's help. As Lesquereux's and Grandfather's stated goals were the same, that is, to provide a means for the study of our fossil past by amateur and inexperienced collectors, I decided to increase the accessibility of Lesquereux's material on the coal flora as seen in the fossil record by publishing the interlinked digital version. Here is how the four-volume work is organized: Volume I and Volume II were published together in a single binding but have separate tables of contents; Volume III was published in a separate binding with no table of contents but with a separate, comprehensive and updated index. The Atlas was published partly in a separate binding and as additional plates in Volume III; I have combined the indexes of those plates into a separate index, apart from the index of botanical names and the index of habitats and locales. The interlinking needs some explanation. The Tables of Contents faithfully follow Lesquereux's arrangement, but I have divided the material into large chunks, endeavoring to keep similarly named fossils together in a number of rather long HTML pages. You can read the work straight through from beginning to end simply by following the Continue link at the bottom of each HTML page. You can also start from the Atlas, where there are links from the key to each Atlas page back to the descriptions of the fossils. The description of each fossil that is figured has a link to the appropriate plate. There are also links to the fossil literature available on the Internet and also to Grandfather's photographs of the fossils that he collected with Father. In a few places I have attempted a layman's translation of Lesquereux's scientific terminology; Lesquereux recommended that the interested reader consult Asa Gray's First Lessons in Botany and Vegetable Physiology, which was in Charles Darwin's personal library, and which has a glossary of the technical terms that Lesquereux uses. Leo Lesquereux earlier had published several works with additional sketches and scientific descriptions, notably in the single-volume Geology of Pennsylvania, authored by Henry Darwin Rogers and first published by Van Nostrand in 1858, and to which he refers quite often in the present four-volume set from the later geological survey of Pennsylvania. I have added my copy (printed in 1868) of that work to this webpage through links in both works. You can find that webpage standing alone here. George Langford, III, started February, 2011, presently October 2011
|