The Millbrook Fossil Collectors' Society

14th October, 1887. — West Limestone Quarry, north face.

Cold morning, ground crisp underfoot. Walked out before sun with Beatrice and the Penrose boy. The new quarryman, Mr. Halloran, has set aside for us a slab from yesterday's cut, the underside crowded with brachiopods such as I have not seen in this layer in twenty years of looking. We sat down on the broken stones and could not stop laughing.

I write this not for any journal in Boston or Philadelphia. I write it for ourselves, the Society, and for whatever child fifty years from now opens this drawer and asks what we were doing.

We were paying attention. That is the whole of it. The earth had laid down a sea here, and lifted it, and broken it, and the limestone held what the sea had carried, and we found it because we troubled to look. Every shell in this quarry was once an animal that ate, that breathed seawater through its mantle, that lived its small important life two hundred million years before any of us drew breath. To pick one up in October light and brush the dust away with a hare's-foot brush — I cannot tell you what this is, only that it is.

To any new member reading this: do not let them tell you that what we do here is small, or that real paleontology lives only in the universities now. The universities will not walk the East Creek beds at first light. They will not know which fence-corner at Mill Dam yields fish-scales after a hard rain. They will not sit with you on a cold rock and count ribs until your fingers ache. This is the work. We are doing the work. The world is older and stranger than anyone has yet imagined and there is room in it for every careful pair of hands willing to look.

— Bring your nephew. Bring your daughter. Bring your wife if she will come and your husband if he won't. The quarry is open. The creek is running clear. The ridge cut is full of brachiopods. There has never been a better October than this one.