REMARKS ON SOME FOSSIL IMPRESSIONS IN THE SANDSTONE ROCKS OF CONNECTICUT RIVER

Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854. Very good plus.. First edition of the first US scientific book illustrated with a photograph, an exploration of fossilized dinosaur tracks - a wonderfully well-preserved copy. Scientists struggled valiantly against the imperfect illustration methods of woodcut, engraving, etching, and lithography for centuries. But the 19th century brought a new technology for representing subjects with more accuracy than ever before: photography. REMARKS ON SOME FOSSIL IMPRESSIONS IN THE SANDSTONE ROCKS OF CONNECTICUT RIVER is only the second book produced in America to include a photographic illustration, and the first American scientific publication to do so.

In the medical field, John C. Warren is best known as the Harvard surgeon who performed the first publicly demonstrated procedure on an ether-anesthetized patient in 1845. It was clear then that Warren understood the importance of photography: after the event, he organized a reenactment of the procedure to be immortalized in daguerreotype by Boston photographers Southworth and Hawes. Warren's interest in photography intersected with his interest in natural history in the form of REMARKS ON SOME FOSSIL IMPRESSIONS IN THE SANDSTONE ROCKS OF CONNECTICUT RIVER, which features a salt-printed photograph of a rock slab of fossilized animal tracks.

This monograph discusses other fossils, but the most notable section of the book details the slab. Bird and turtle tracks are among the footprints found preserved in the rock, but they are accompanied by prints that were far more puzzling. Warren theorized that these "footsteps of an unknown animal" may be those of "probably a reptile or a mammal," but concluded that "perhaps it is safer to believe... that it was an animal of a construction now not existing." Indeed, the footprints were later proven to belong to dinosaurs of the Early Jurassic. 9.25'' x 5.5''. Original blue cloth binding with gilt lettering to front board. Yellow endpapers. Folded photographic salt-printed frontispiece of fossil footprints. Two in-text black-and-white illustrations. 54 pages. Binding with light edgewear, spine ends bumped. Leaves with occasional tiny spots of soil. Clean and bright.