Patrons of Paleontology: How Government Support Shaped a Science

By Jane P. Davidson

A history of North American and European governments supporting paleontology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the motivation behind it.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, North American and European governments generously funded the discoveries of such famous paleontologists and geologists as Henry de la Beche, William Buckland, Richard Owen, Thomas Hawkins, Edward Drinker Cope, O. C. Marsh, and Charles W. Gilmore. In Patrons of Paleontology, Jane Davidson explores the motivation behind this rush to fund exploration, arguing that eagerness to discover strategic resources like coal deposits was further fueled by patrons who had a genuine passion for paleontology and the fascinating creatures that were being unearthed. These early decades of government support shaped the way the discipline grew, creating practices and enabling discoveries that continue to affect paleontology today.

“This slim book, graced with beautiful facsimile reproductions of gorgeous paleontological folio art, is a treasure trove of vertebrate paleontological history, sacred and arcane.” —The Quarterly Review of Biology

“Patrons of Paleontology is a good introduction to the ambitious individuals and institutions that pursued their own, national, and institutional interests over centuries in a variety of contexts.” —Journal of American History

“Who pays for palaeontological research and why? Patrons of Paleontology will be a useful reference guide for anyone interested in the early history of the subject and some of the social and historical context in which it occurred.” —Paul Barrett, Priscum, The Newsletter of the Palentological Society

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9780253033574

Book preview

PATRONS OF PALEONTOLOGY

Life of the Past

James O. Farlow, editor

PATRONS OF PALEONTOLOGY

How Government Support Shaped a Science

Jane P. Davidson

Indiana University Press

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

Office of Scholarly Publishing

Herman B Wells Library 350

1320 East 10th Street

Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

© 2017 by Jane P. Davidson

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Davidson, Jane P.

Title: Patrons of paleontology : how government support shaped a science / Jane P. Davidson.

Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, [2017] | Series: Life of the past | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017001785 | ISBN 9780253025715 (cl : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Paleontology—Finance—History—18th century. | Paleontology—Finance—History—19th century. | Paleontology—Finance—History—20th century. | Paleontology—United States—Finance—History—19th century. | Paleontology—United States—Finance—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC QE705.A1 D38 2017 | DDC 560.72/073—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017001785

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His name was James W. Pierce. He was born in 1880 and died in 1969 one day short of his eighty-ninth birthday. When he was almost sixteen, he and his four younger siblings were orphaned by the death of their father. Their mother had died about three years earlier. It fell to him to raise his family. And he did. It is told in his family that when he and his oldest sister went to school, they took the little ones along and the children slept on the benches while Jim and Alice studied their lessons. Jim grew up and married Bertha Akers in 1902. Together they had ten children. Jim and Bertha raised their family on a farm in rural Missouri, about sixty miles south of St. Louis in the Ozark foothills. It is told that Jim and Bertha were very concerned that their children get as much and as fine an education as they possibly could. A good education was a way up and out of the lives they had. In these early years of the twentieth century, a good education was probably going to end at about the eighth grade. Some would go on to high school. These were difficult things to accomplish. For example, one of Jim and Bertha’s sons, whose name was Robert, rented a room along with his cousin in the town near where they lived so he could finish his senior year because it was so difficult to ride horseback every day to and from the high school in the winter. Too much for both rider and horse. The high school was located about five miles away from the family farm. Thus, when Jim’s day’s work on the farm was done, and he was so tired he would fall asleep eating his dinner, he would nonetheless get up, change clothes, get on his horse, and ride on such roads as there were through the rural Ozark pre–New Deal darkness to the one-room schoolhouse a few miles away and be the president of the school board. Jim and the farmers nearby thought that education was invaluable. They taught their children that.

His name was Robert W. Pierce (1913–2001). Robert was the fifth of the ten children of James and Bertha. He went to college before and after World War II. Robert began as a teacher in one of those one-room schools in rural Missouri. There is a photograph of him, along with his little brother, George Pierce, with the entire school population of the Sittin School in 1933. George, in his late teens, still looks like a boy. Robert was barely twenty and seems so very young in that photograph. George had just recently been one of Robert’s students. George had come to help Robert give and grade the final exams for five students who would finish eighth grade. Education was so important that all the students dressed in their best for this photograph, and Robert had on a suit. In these one-room schools in rural Missouri, he taught everyone who came through the door, from elementary to high school ages. He had fistfights with the bigger boys who did not want to be there anymore. He gave emergency first aid to two little ones who arrived at school one winter day with frostbite. Education was sacred.

Eventually Robert taught high school and served on the school board in the tiny town of Glenrock, in the oil fields of Wyoming. There my parents met the couple that would be my godparents. Ernest, my godfather, valued education as well, even though he had almost none in the formal sense. He read all the time and taught himself. He was what they called a rock hound, but he was much more. He was a lapidary as well. His rock shop was full of his jewelry. It was he who taught me about fossils. He knew as much about them as a student of geology in a university would have known. And my dad would stand there and listen, because he thought fossils were cool too, and he wanted to learn. Ernest worked in Conoco’s oil fields. Eventually my dad went to work for Conoco too. He began as a groundskeeper in the refinery in Glenrock, Wyoming. He pulled weeds, killed rattlers, and raked rocks. When he retired, Robert was running three of Conoco’s petrochemical plants. He worked eighteen-hour days, normally, and on weekends went to the plants to catch up on his paperwork. Robert thought education was important and a way up and out, just as his parents had thought. In a time before smart phones, the men in his plants knew precisely how many minutes it took him to drive home from the plant at the end of the day. When I was in high school, the phone would begin ringing just about the time Daddy should have been home. I’m sorry, Mr. Pierce is not here yet … oh! Wait, sir, I see him pulling into the driveway. Do you wish to hold for him? I would stand there holding the phone and my dad would come in, look at it, and look like thunder. He would take the call and then turn around, no time to eat, and go back to the plants. Before he left, as he did every day, he would ask What did you learn in school today? Not, what did you do? What did you learn? I had to have a list of particulars to tell him; if I tried to blow it off, he would say, I do not believe you did not learn anything today. You have a fine high school and good teachers. If you did not learn, it is your fault. Now, what did you learn today? Every day. It was his way of telling me I was more important than Conoco. I am sure Granddad asked his children the same thing. Every day.

His name was Charles J. McClain (1931–2015). Charles was my cousin. His mother was one of my dad’s little sisters. Charles started teaching in a one-room rural Missouri school at age sixteen, right out of high school. Just as his mother had done, just as Uncle Robert had done. Eventually Charles had a stellar career in university administration. He founded a college and was for a very long time the president of a university. After that he served in the position equivalent to chancellor of the Missouri university system. Charles earned his Doctor of Education degree at age twenty-eight. I was impressed. I set out to be a college professor too and to beat Charles in obtaining my PhD at an earlier age—which I did, though I never fully caught up to his great career. I suspect my aunt asked him what he learned at school every day too. She was a teacher who had started right out of high school as well, earned a master’s degree, and taught all her life.

What did you learn in school today? Now I tell my students to ask this of their children or grandchildren. And expect an answer. Not, what did you do? What did you learn?

In 1834, the British amateur paleontologist, Thomas Hawkins, commented of his studies, I addressed myself to worm-eaten books and last to fossils. And so has this author. I have done this largely because of these three men: James, Robert, and Charles.

Granddad Pierce, Daddy, and Charles—thanks. And thanks again, Ernest. This one’s for all of you.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1. The Beginnings of Government Support for Paleontology

2. Eighteenth-Century and Early Nineteenth-Century Paleontologists and Patrons

3. Developments in Government Support for Paleontology in the United States between 1830 and about 1880

4. Paleontology in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Surveys Outside the United States

5. Government Support for Paleontology in the Late Nineteenth Century and the Turn of the Twentieth Century: 1880 to about 1940

Conclusion: The Chain of Paleontology

APPENDIX: GLOSSARY OF PROMINENT PATRONS AND PALEONTOLOGISTS

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PRIMARY SOURCES

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SECONDARY SOURCES

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

The Costs of Doing Business

There is a time coming and now not very distant, when the vagaries of the anti-geologists will be as obsolete as those of the geographers of Salamanca or as those of the astronomers who upheld the orthodoxy of Ptolemy against Galileo and Newton: and they will be regarded as a sort of curious fossils, very monstrous and bizarre and altogether of an extinct type.

—Hugh Miller, The Testimony of the Rocks

I reckon among my readers a class of non-geologists who think that my geological chapters would be less dull if I left out the geology.

—Hugh Miller, The Cruise of the Betsey

Between 1715 and 1717 a posthumous work dealing with minerals and fossils written by a former papal physician, Michele Mercati, was published with funding from Pope Clement XI. The book was entitled Metallotheca and detailed the natural history collections of several late sixteenth-century popes. This was a very early instance of governmental (in this case papal) support for paleontology. Not only did the papacy back Mercati’s work with fossils, but Clement XI also paid for the publication of Metallotheca, well over a hundred years later. Metallotheca was a lavish book with a very large number of actual engravings bound within its pages. It was in itself a work of art. The book’s frontispiece constitutes the entire story. The pope is shown seated on his throne looking very regal, and not a little stern, and several clerics are literally groveling in front of him. One holds Metallotheca. One could not find a better depiction of government support for paleontology and geology if one went out and tried.

Government support has always been connected to the sciences of geology and paleontology. This book is an account of why and how that happened. In general this connection began in the sixteenth century and grew, by the century’s end, into a fairly well-established practice. This study is the story of working relationships between geologists, paleontologists, and governments, but moreover it is an account of how government support built the science of paleontology. The term government is used herein in a rather general way to include anyone or any entity with political power. Thus, government could mean a local duke or squire, a pope, a king, or later on, such entities as professional societies supported by rulers, parliamentary bodies (such as state legislatures or the US Congress), geological surveys, and of course museums that were under some kind of government aegis. Geologists and paleontologists naturally turned to such venues of support from the very beginning of scientific interest in fossils. Certainly by the 1500s scientists were looking at the physical structures of the planet, what we would call geology, and they were also looking at fossils. Fossils were at that point rather misunderstood and unknown commodities. Scientists did not really comprehend much about them. They thought that these items were curiosities that needed study because they resembled living organisms, albeit stone. Some fossils, like belemnites and ammonites, however, did not look like anything living known at the time, but somehow they seemed organic in morphology. While there was a good amount of ignorance and confusion to go around, people were interested in fossils nonetheless. Fossils automatically found their way into what would come to be called natural history and had already begun to find their way into formal and folk medicines as well. This may have had something to do with their organic appearance.

Sometimes obtaining specimens was relatively easy. One might just pick them up. The word specimen derives from Latin for something dug up. But one could literally find fossils lying on the ground. It was not always necessary to dig them up. Either way, as the interest in fossils grew alongside the newly evolving science of geology, scientists in many cases encountered logistical difficulties in collecting, transporting, and housing their fossils. After all, they were rocks.

It is a truism that scientific research and fieldwork costs money. Today’s scientists have as a part of their professional DNA the obligation and the use of professional tools with which to obtain grants for research and publication. It is expected. But this component of modern scientific disciplines—whether geology, paleontology, biochemistry, or whatever—came to be integral because in the early Renaissance, scientists went to governments for monetary or materiel support. It is how science evolved. It is certainly how paleontology evolved. Paleontology has always been connected with the support of patrons, and for the most part, these were government patrons. Much of the inexorable connection between government patrons and paleontologists has to do with logistics. After all, it is logical that if, for example, one is mining and discovers fossil tracks on the roof of the mine shaft, this is something that might be of interest to a scientist. If one were working in a limestone quarry and found astounding fossil animals or plants, this might interest local paleontologists. In a time before one could sell fossils in rock shops to collectors, there was not a lot of fiscal benefit to quarrying fossils out of mines or cliffs. However, a paleontologist could find a way to have that sort of work accomplished if he had a patron.

While it is later in the history of paleontology, a perfect example of this strategy of getting government support is Mary Anning (1799–1847), an early nineteenth-century fossilist. Mary Anning collected and did some primitive excavation of fossils from the formations along the English coast in Dorset. Her family had a business doing this sort of work (i.e., they had a rock shop). But in an effort to really make such a thing profitable, not merely a tourist attraction, she sometimes went to local members of the British nobility for monetary support. They paid well for those fossils. Scientists who studied Mary’s fossils received publication support from the Geological Society of London and the Royal Society. These organizations were supported and populated with members of the British aristocracy, including the Royal Family.

But this gets ahead of the story of the logistical connection between government and paleontologist. Before the advent of railroads, transporting perhaps tons of rock for the examination and study of fossil contents required personnel and animals. Perhaps even da Vinci had a servant or two who went rock hunting with him.

One needed to pay these personnel to transport cargo, and even the mules needed hay. The paleontologist needed financial support to undertake the preparation of fossils and to maintain himself while doing his studies. One might have assistants whose jobs were those of preparators. The scientist might need people to pick up the fossils and carry them to an artist who would prepare illustrations. Printers needed personnel to do the casting of type, the setting of pages, the making of intaglio prints, of lithographs, eventually the shooting of photographs, the making of photo engravings, and on it goes. This is how science developed in Early Modern Europe. One did not do paleontology in a vacuum. The scientist had many who worked for and with him, and those people got paid. Paleontology was an expensive business, and government patrons had the money. Thus, paleontologists went to government entities for financial support. Virtually none of the scientists were wealthy persons. They needed patrons. This was true when da Vinci was climbing around the mountains of Tuscany at the beginning of the 1500s and found fossil marine mollusks. It was true when Konrad Gesner was collecting fossils and minerals at midcentury and writing about them in his beautiful natural history volumes. Hundreds of years later, it was still true when E. D. Cope stepped down from the Union Pacific car in 1870 and went off to prospect for fossils in western Wyoming.

Museums in which to house collections of fossils, minerals, and other interesting natural history items were equally costly. There had to be a physical structure in which a collection could be displayed. There most likely would be need for a curator of some kind. The curator probably required a staff. The building in which the museum stood very likely needed some guards. All these things were constituents of the very first museums such as the papal Metallotheca of the late 1500s.

This study is organized chronologically for the most part. In some cases, the subject matter overlaps from one period to another. This has to do with the fact that some government institutions continued for decades, even centuries. In some cases publication series, such as those of the US Geological Survey, also lasted for many decades. Activities in paleontology by various scientists, such as Leidy, Marsh, Owen, and Cope, lasted for many decades as well. Thus, one cannot entirely compartmentalize the materials into neat chronological segments. This analysis begins, as we noted, in the sixteenth century and continues onward.

I have organized this study into chapters reflective of time periods between the latter half of the sixteenth century until about the mid-twentieth century. I have tried herein to discuss the subject matter of various divisions of paleontology generally from a chronological standpoint and, as well, to discuss important paleontologists. Their relationships with governments are the thrust of this work. It becomes evident at once that the most important paleontologists during the developmental period of the science all worked for governments in some capacity. Thus it is clear that government patrons and support shaped the modern science of paleontology. It is also demonstrable that the paleontologists themselves shaped government support as time passed. This is that story.

Writing a history of British Geological Surveys in 1937, John S. Flett commented, The closing years of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century saw the rise of Geology as a branch of inductive science. Before that time many illustrious men had published treatises on the history of the globe that are now forgotten or read only with amused curiosity (Flett, 1937, 11). This book is in part a refutation of that comment. While the modern sciences of geology, and especially paleontology, blossomed in the nineteenth century, they did not begin in the nineteenth century. Nor are all those earlier works forgotten. Some are read, as Flett noted, with amusement, but they endure. They are part of the pattern and the story of how government created paleontology.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were formative periods for geology and paleontology. Until the final quarter of the eighteenth century, there was not a tremendous amount of paleontological publication or research. But it did exist. And paleontology was always connected to government supports. With the turn of the nineteenth century, the science began to develop rapidly. Some of this change had to do with the Industrial Revolution and advances in mining and the building of canals and eventually railroads. Again, governments provided invaluable assistance to paleontologists. As the nineteenth century progressed, there were numerous geological surveys established in the United States and other nations. These surveys supported paleontology. Indeed they were often staffed by paleontologists. The role of the military is also especially important in the United States and Canada. This will be discussed at length in chapters 3 and 5.

This study also deals with museums and scientific institutions that fostered paleontology or provided publication outlets for it. Again, many of these, especially at mid-nineteenth century, were government entities, at least in part. As the century proceeded there were more private institutions and museums that supported paleontology and paleontologists, but even these institutions came into contact with government support and employees. This is especially the case at the beginning of the twentieth century.

One of the fascinating aspects of the connections between government supporters and paleontology is how diversified the paleontology topics were. Almost from the beginning, and certainly by the seventeenth century with scientists like Robert Plot and Edward Lhwyd, paleontologists were studying not only vertebrate fossils, but invertebrates and plant fossils as well. While some may think in the present era that certain types of vertebrate fossils are more interesting, more sexy so to speak, from the standpoint of attracting the interest of those that might support science, this was not the historic case. In fact, it is still not the case. As we look at the composition of how paleontology is done today, we find that in essence it is done the way it has always been done, going back at least as far as the late sixteenth century. Paleontology evolved to be the way it is because of the interaction of the scientists and governmental supports. This was a symbiotic interaction. The paleontologist laid down guidelines for what he wanted in terms of governmental support, and those guidelines came to define the science. Thus, for example, one found an interesting fossil. The patron paid to have it excavated, transported, and illustrated. The patron paid for a publication of this fossil, and possibly also paid for a cabinet or museum in which to display it. That is how Mercati did paleontology for his papal sponsors at the end of the 1500s. It is how paleontology is done in the twenty-first century. Without government support and the symbiotic connection between paleontologists and governments, this science would not be what it is now. Even the discovery of certain strategic specimens might not have happened. For instance, if the Transcontinental Railroad had not been built along its route in Wyoming, Cope and Marsh might never have found major dinosaur and mammalian specimens. The story of Marsh’s having found fossil bones of a primitive species of horse in a pile of rocks beside the rail line is true. What better example could there have been of how government support shaped the science of paleontology?

One cannot discuss paleontology without discussing paleontologists and fossils. Thus, this work, while not paleontology or biography per se, has to deal with important scientists and their equally important discoveries. One cannot get around this because, after all, the paleontologists themselves helped shape the science with the financial backing of their governmental patrons. As I noted above, this was a symbiosis. One could no more talk about government support and leave out the scientists or their discoveries than one could talk about a disease and leave out the pathogen that caused it or the possible treatments for it. To this end, I have included an annotated bibliography of primary sources as well as an appendix of those who were prominent government patrons and paleontologists supported by government patronage. In addition, I have tried to elucidate the more significant fossil finds made or publicized through government support.

I like to collect old books. Like fossils, they can be peculiar, not well preserved, and difficult to comprehend. Their contents may sometimes be quite dated or downright arcane, but they always have something to tell us. They are indeed the fossils of intellectual evolution. The contents may not now serve the purpose that the author originally intended, but any given old book can speak to its modern owner and provide all manner of information nonetheless.

While it is a history of the development of paleontology, my book is in many respects a study of old geology and paleontology books as well. Print publications were how one presented paleontological research until very recently, and books, after all, were a major output of the various government entities that supported and shaped the science of paleontology. How a book was bound, who owned it, where it went before it arrived in, say, my hands, all of these are important parts of the book’s story, but also important parts of the history of paleontology.

A case point is a little book I own that is entitled The Principles of Geology Explained and Viewed in Their Relations to Revealed and Natural Religion. It is an interesting old fossil. This book was written by David King, a Scottish minister. It contained an appendix written by John Scouler (1804–1871), who was a relatively well-known (in his time) Scottish geologist. Scouler was a medical doctor and geologist and eventually became the head of the Andersonian Museum in Glasgow. This was a natural history museum that also had paleontological collections. This particular edition of Principles of Geology Explained was printed in New York by Robert Carter and Brothers in 1851. It had a few illustrations of fossils, compared with extant organisms. It even had a poem comparing the modern living nautilus with the ammonite. The thrust of this book was to discuss the place of evolution, extinction, geologic time, and fossils in the context of the Bible and what was being termed natural theology. The authors were well versed in contemporary geological literature and cited works such as Robert Chambers’s 1844 The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and some of the works of Hugh Miller. The text of The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation is so abstruse that it is almost unreadable. One cannot help wondering, did people really speak English like that? Did high school–age students in the 1850s and 1860s understand a book like this that was designed for a young adult or adult reader? Since my present interest is not really how literate young Britons and Americans were at that point, for this historian’s purpose, the most important component of this particular copy is its provenance.

The related sciences of geology and paleontology were very important at mid-nineteenth century. I would not agree with Edward Bailey’s remark that Henry De la Beche constituted its [the Geological Survey] whole scientific staff (Bailey, 1952, 21) when it began (1852), but that remark points to the fact that midcentury was a time in which the modern sciences of geology and paleontology flourished. That is where the little 1851 Principles of Geology Explained comes into play. This particular copy of the work once belonged to a religious order of women who had it in their convent library and school library (presumably attached to the convent) in Peekskill, New York. Its flyleaves are inscribed with The Convent Library St. Mary’s Peekskill, New York and Memorial Library Sisterhood of S. Mary S. Gabriel’s School. These tell the reader that geology and its comparison with natural theology (i.e., can we make the Bible and geology mesh together and not go to hell) was important at mid-nineteenth century. And while we knew that already, we did not necessarily think that a convent would own such a book. Obviously geology and paleontology were popular, and safe, enough when treated properly to be read by nuns. The Sisterhood of St. Mary was, by the way, an order of Anglican nuns founded in New York in 1865. The order was the first Anglican order for women in the United States. It exists today. They were contemplatives, but also they were nurses and worked with the poor. And evidently they had school. They were, for their time, educated women. In one tiny octavo book on two flyleaves there is a whole commentary about science, religion, women, and what was important to know in 1865.

John Scouler, who wrote an appendix for the book, besides being a physician, a world explorer who worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company, and eventually a university geologist-paleontologist and head of the Andersonian Museum in Glasgow, was also a member of the Geological Society of Glasgow. He was also involved with government support for paleontology.

So even when a modern historian picks up a fossil book such as this, it too can have a story to contribute to the history of government support for paleontology. The story can be deduced from its provenance as well as its contents. And the story this book tells definitely reinforces the belief that many historians of science, myself included, have that geology and paleontology were a big thing in the nineteenth century. Geology and paleontology were beginning to seem ingrained when one realizes that this book could have been important enough to be printed in the United States and considered to be something significant for a person’s education. Did the sisters read this book? Sure. Some of them did. It would not have made its way into their convent if some sister, perhaps the local superior, had not read it. One cannot help feeling that those early members of the Sisterhood of St. Mary should be given a smile of thanks. Little did they realize that they were playing a part not only in the future education of others, but in the history of paleontology as well.

The government publications themselves stand as records of how and when various government entities sponsored paleontology. Certainly this sponsorship extended backward along the entire timeline of this symbiosis between scientist and government patron. This leads to the question of how much money was spent on a given publication, and if the patron made any of that back. With a work like Mercati’s Metallotheca, the pope did not expect to make money. This catalog was never offered for sale. We can also assume that those members of the gentry and peerage who paid for the printing of Edward Lhwyd’s Lithophylacii Britannici Ichnographia (British Mineral Specimens Depicted) in 1699 never expected to recoup anything. But when we come to the late eighteenth century, the nineteenth century, and onward, it must be assumed that the patrons hoped at least to recoup some of their investments. We can, and will, demonstrate that government patrons were generally pretty generous with their support for paleontologists. There are some records of how much, for example, members of American and Canadian national and state surveys were paid. There are records of how many copies of reports were to be printed, along with the amounts of appropriations made to achieve this. This sort of thing generally points to the fact that money was available. There were also cases in which the monies did not seem overly forthcoming. Ferdinand V. Hayden is notorious for not having paid the rather modest requests of Edward Drinker Cope in a timely fashion when Cope was working for him in Wyoming during the early 1870s. Essentially it looks as though Hayden kept the money for his own personnel and expeditions. But most of the time, it seems from the data we will demonstrate herein that the government patron was willing to finance fairly well and in a timely fashion. One only need look at the huge amount of appropriations that President Thomas Jefferson obtained for Lewis and Clark to see that this generosity (i.e., interest) for paleontology was part of a long-standing tradition of how governments worked with their scientists.

This is not to say that government sponsors did not try to make some money back on their publications. Toward the end of the nineteenth century one can point to whole advertisement lists of books and pamphlets for sale by