"The enjoyments of elegant life you early chose to abandon, preferring to wander for many successive years over the rudest portions of Europe and Asia-regions new to Science-in the hope, happily realized, of winning new truths. By a rare union of favourable circumstances, and of personal qualifications equally rare, you have thus been enabled to become the recognized Interpreter and Historian (not without illustrious aid) of the Silurian Period."
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Source : John Jeremiah Bigsby (1868). “Thesaurus Siluricus: The Flora and Fauna of the Silurian Period, with Addenda (from Recent Acquisitions)”, p.3
