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Rocks of the Devonian System cover nearly one-third of the State of New York from the Hudson Valley westward to Lake Erie—the northern end of the Allegheny Plateau and the Catskill Mountains. Europeans began to explore this region three centuries ago, but the first geological feature reported was a petroleum spring, discovered by Jesuit missionaries in 1656. A natural gas spring was seen in Ontario County by La Salle and Père de Galinée in 1669. In the middle of the eighteenth century, missionaries and explorers first noticed the rocks themselves and the presence of fossils, and in 1755 Lewis Evans separated the Devonian terrane as a distinct region. But genuine geological exploration began only with the settling of the central and western parts of the State after the Revolution, with the survey of the Hudson Valley by Samuel L. Mitchill in 1796. Observations by Larochefoucauld in 1795–1797 gave a fair idea of the character of the rocks in the western part of the State. In 1803 G.-F. G. Volney considerably clarified rock relations across the State and published the first geological map of the United States in color. Early in the nineteenth century travellers such as Pursh, Maclure, Lesueur, David Thomas, Timothy Dwight, and Simeon De Witt published bits of geological information, among which the contributions of De Witt Clinton are particularly notable. Amos Eaton, whose work dominated the field from 1818 to 1836, first worked out in detail the succession of Devonian strata and classified the rocks beyond the level of Primary, Transition, and Secondary. The pioneer period ended in 1836, when the geologists of the Geological Survey of New York began their work.

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