Transcribe Notice of the Ward cabinets...the University of Rochester (1863)

30 OPINIONS OF SCIENTIFIC MEN.

visited almost every important cabinet in the United States and Europe; and I unhesitatingly say that this is one of the richest and most complete in the world. All the specimens are choice- many of them exceedingly rare and unique; while the fossils are in a state of high preservation. But the prominent feature is the completeness with which it represents both in order and character, the course of creation. Each specimen is a letter in the Book of Nature - unfolding the great idea of God as it marched in to realization. To the theologian, philosopher, and student, this Cabinet is a vast repository of thoughts and suggestions to which the Astor Library is nothing. As your journal is pledged for Science as well as Art, I propose to give you - not a catalogue, for that were impossible - but something like "a running commentary" on this valuable compend of the world's history. It may serve a s a guide for any of your readers who may be so fortunate as to visit this unrivalled gallery.

The geological department begins with a very extensive series of rocks arranged in several sections: the first includes some 1,5000 specimens so grouped as to show all the lithological varieties and species. The rest represent the mining district of Saxony, the Plutonic region of the Alps, the volcanic products of Central France, Teneriffe, and Giant's Causeway, the metamorphic strata of Tuscany (with a beautiful collection of Italian marbles), and a large suite illustrating the geology of the Paris Basin. From this introduction, we pass to the fossils, which number about 20,000 specimens, and all arranged so as to illustrate the animal and vegetable like of each successive age. Here are the "palaeozoic plants, secondary reptiles, and tertiary mammals" in wild profusion; floral fragments speak of giant forests which now lie wrapt in the dead and stony sleep of eons; enormous jaws bristling with teeth, and thigh bones a foot in diameter, just out from rocky slabs and point back over millenniums of centuries to the time when "gorgons, hydras, and chimeras dire" were lords of creation. We are ushered first into the presence of the antiquely-fashioned fauna of the silurian - a world of molluscs, corals and crustacea. Save now and there a placoid fish, all are invertebrate: corals and corallines - the fancy architecture of little polyps, the earliest of created beings, crinoids, trilobites (80 varieties), and long orthocratites without number. How strange the aspect earth must have presented in this misty twilight of creation! It was a struggle of light and life