Hitchcock, Edward; Ichnology of New England. A Report on the Sandstone of the Connecticut Valley, especially its Fossil Footmarks. Boston 1858, Large quarto, pp. 220, text figures, and 60 plates, folded hand colored maps. & Supplement to the Ichnology of New England. Boston, 1865. Large quarto, pp. 96, 20 plates. Plates 13-19 are photographic plates.
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The set is complete and both volumes are in the original matching brown cloth,with gilt spine titles. Light wear to binding edges and corners inner hinges nicely re-enforced on supplement volume. Owners book plate on first end sheet of volume 1, very light toning to some outer text and plate margins. Over all an exceptionally clean set in very good condition.
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Hitchcock (1793-1864), a noted naturalist and geologist at Amherst College; is best remembered for his pioneering studies of New England's geology and paleontology. He discovered evidence of glaciation in western Massachusetts and performed early pioneering studies in vertebrate paleontology and paleoichnology in the Triassic sandstones of Connecticut and Massachusetts. Hitchcock was a professor of geology at Amherst College when he received a letter from a friend describing a stone slab with footprints in it. Hitchcock first described the prints in an 1836 paper and followed this with several others over twenty years. During this time he also built a large collection of fossil prints for the Amherst museum. He reviewed the entire collection and the results of those studies are contained in the above work and its supplement. He coined the term "ichnology' for his study of the prints. The first plate; a chromolithograph shows the site where Pliny Moody discovered the very first fossil tracks in 1802. Moody helped prepare the sketch on which this plate is based. Hitchcock never considered the prints as being made by dinosaurs. These prints were made by large bipeds and dinosaurs were thought to be quadrapeds, thus he believed the prints to be bird prints. Hitchcock followed his original work with a supplement. This is an early use of the photographic plates in publishing in the United States.