a ed to juga diot They might well be forgiven for not supposing that the promulgator of the wretched apparatus of 1707 had invented the atmospheric engine in 1695; and it might have been expected that a paper making such grave charges should not have exhibited so many and such singular discrepancies between the representation and the truth, as have been here pointed out... 90 ned A. AINGER. Some Account of the Order in which the Fossil Saurians were Discovered. 2 SIR, 120 ག ཀ ནི ཙ ། Little notice was taken of the former discoveries mentioned in the Philosophical Transactions, of which, I believe, the Whitby coast furnished the first examples, when the Rev. Mr. Peter Hawker of Stroud, in 1812, set up a tent to trace some bones and a head, discovered in the blue lias at Weston, near Bath; and, following up the quarrymen's labours, succeeded in procuring the head and nearly all the vertebræ, with parts of the bones of the fins of a large animal, which, on his transmitting it to his museum at Stroud, caused much inquiry, and a desire to procure specimens. Numberless fragments were excavated at Bath of jaws and teeth very perfect, of which about that time the author procured some fine samples; and Mr. Hawker's crocodile, as it was then called, induced Mr. Parkinson to get a drawing of it; but the artist he employed omitted to notice a peculiarity in the scales that surround the eye, which the writer of this notice afterwards discovered, and engraved to give away. Soon after Mr. James Johnson of Bristol, in 1813, raised an enormous head from low-water mark at Lyme, and brought it to Bristol at the expense of twenty pounds; it weighed, I believe, near a ton, and was 2 feet 6 inches broad, by 2 feet 10 inches long, and 11 inches thick. There are two large cavities on the sides of the frontal bone, and the sockets of the eyes are 14 inches long, by 7 inches wide; few of the scales of the eyes were seen, and were near an inch in diameter the sockets being oblong, not oval, as were those of Mr. Peter Hawker's specimen. About the same period Mr. Day, of Henton, got a very large head imperfect, but several of the teeth in their places. Next, Mr. Brakenridge, of Bristol, acquired from the Theynsham quarries a very large and singular head, with high frontal bones, and a circular eye, also having plates very distinct, and a considerable number of teeth: this was also discovered about 1813. Mary Anning, of Lyme in Dorsetshire, to whose industry and skill we owe nearly all the fine specimens since found, next sold to Mr. Bullock, a head about 5 feet long, with fifty teeth in each jaw, the eyes also defended by sixteen scales; which having been purchased of him by the British Museum for forty-seven pounds, Mr. Kenig cleared away the superfluous limestone, and discovered the nostrils. All these were ichthyosauri. Mr. Johnson next procured a head of the Gangetic crocodile from Parbee island; and, in 1819, at Whitby, in the alum shale, half a mile from the entrance of Whitby harbour, another was disclosed of this tribe; it was 3 feet long, and had several teeth resembling tenui-rostris, and several of the vertebræ adhering: this has been engraved. In 1818, Mr. Morgan, of Bristol, from the schists, at low water, at Watchet, in Somersetshire, extracted nearly the whole animal with the fins adhering, ribs, and entire tail. This is the only one found there, and was purchased by the Surgeons Company in London for 251. The Geological Society also procured one nearly entire, of Mary Anning, of Lyme; Colonel Birch had another; M. Delabèche a fourth, all nearly perfect. After which the plethiosaurus, now in the possession of the Duke of Buckingham, and for which he gave Miss Anning above 100%., was brought to light by her patience and assiduity; and, lastly, she raised the tenui-rostris, a new species that has been acquired of her for 501. by the Bristol Institution; since that, others even more perfect of the ichthyosaurus have come to light; but the most perfect of any, she raised at considerable expense, in 1824, and I believe still possesses it; having attained it by lifting the bed of schistous limestone inwards to the coast, and removing it piece by piece, and even turning it to clean it and shew the best surface. Since that period little has turned up, until 1826, when at Whitby, in the schist, they are said to have discovered a true crocodile fossil, which is now in the museum there, and is published by Dr. Young, their secretary, in his second edition of his Survey of the Yorkshire Coast. In Brook's Journal, vol. xxv. page 101, is an account of one of these animals, found eighty feet from the surface of the earth in 1810, near Stratford-on-Avon. He called it a crocodile. Cuvier says one was found at Maestrich quarries, and conjectures it to be an intermediate genus between animals of the lizard tribe which have long and forked tongues, and those that have a short tongue, and the palate armed with teeth: the skeleton was twenty-four feet long, the head onesixth of its length: he thought then it inhabited the ocean.See Jameson's Essays. Fragments of heads have been found in the Vincentine in Italy, in pyritical blue clay limestone, also at the bottom of the cliffs at Honfleur, in France, and Havre; at Alençon was found one also which Cuvier considered as a lost species of crocodile; at Newark, in Nottinghamshire, Dr. Stukeley found what he called a lost species of crocodile. Professor Jameson says all these fossil remains of oviparous quadrupeds belong to very old flötz strata; but they seem to me to be more related to the porpoise and dolphin than the lizard, which they only resemble in the jaw bones, their fins (ridiculously enough called paddles) being very nearly resembling those of the porpoise, as does the general character and attitude. At Colonel Birch's sale*, at Bullock's Museum, his specimens procured him a great price, but the principal one, which was that engraved for the Royal Society, it was said he bought in at 1201. Now much more perfect ones are offered by Mary Anning for 501., one indeed quite perfect. A work containing good engravings of all the varieties now in England would be a very desirable acquisition to naturalists, and would do credit to the country, if accompanied by a good history of the whole tribe from true documents; but such a work should be a national undertaking: for, under the present state of discouragement from the expense of printing, it would ruin any individual. Even our *The professed object of which, he said, was to provide for Miss Anning, of Lyme. rarest collections of geological specimens will not pay the publishers; and unless government, through parliament, afford their assistance, the French nation will and must take the lead of us in this branch of natural history. To Cuvier, we owe the osteological key to those discoveries, which Sir E. Home, Mr. Coneybeare, and Professor Buckland have used freely to unlock the character of the specimens found at Lyme and elsewhere; but we ought ever to remember, that the world would to this day have remained ignorant of the treasures England possessed, but for the patient labours of three female pioneers in this service, viz. Mary Anning, a dealer, Miss Congrieve, and Miss Philpots, residents, who for years had been collecting and preserving these bodies from the wreck of the coast; the two last without any other view than the gratification of a laudable curiosity, and who, with unequalled liberality, communicated their collections to every man of science that visited the place; and it is to liberal minds like theirs and Miss Bennet's, of Wiltshire, that we owe the first rescuing these natural gems from the spoilers, and the consequent credit in which this country, on this score, is held by surrounding nations. They, and a few others, gathered the materials of this fabric raised to fame, and are entitled to a full share of the honours reaped by those who, without their aid, could never have brought them before the world, yet, some of whom, with a vanity that greatly impedes scientific pursuits, affix their own insignificant names to every little shell they find, or purchase of some poor quarrier on the road side; so that now we have not less than twenty-three fossil ammonites, that have little or no other description to know them by than the family names. of the supposed first finders! In almost every other department of fossil conchology, indeed, the same abuse prevails, and this tickle-toby method has now been carried too far. To the discoverers of such systems as those of Werner, or Hutton, or Cuvier, there can be no objection to attach their names; it is both for their honour and our own convenience; but in scientific pursuits, this scramble for notoriety disgraces the appropriators of such fragile monuments, for all must be demolished before we can know, by a marked distinction, what shell or fossil remain we are possessed of, or talking about, so as to come to a knowledge of the stratum to which it belongs. The worst is, that this greediness of fame infects even public societies, and they would cancel, if possible, the discoveries of private individuals unconnected with them, or veil them by neglecting them in their general reports, until such time as the leading members of their own institution are prepared to amalgamate them into their papers as previously known to them; and this system of exclusiveness is not only unhandsome and unjust, but prejudicial to the discovery of truth in science, as it checks the ardour of many solitary labourers in every branch of study, and so far impedes the march of science. Next to an affected nomenclature, is the desire some men entertain unnecessarily to change its language, in the hope that no one will afterwards be so well able to understand it as themselves. Such are always the resources of little minds. Not such the ideas of the great literati of Italy, who, wishing to improve their country and language, used, in preference, the commonest expressions and simplest construction of sentences, as the only last and best method of conveying intelligence to the general mind. Such were the noble views of our immortal Addison; and had we not degenerated from his especial example to this day, we should have not only been able to convey our ideas, without refraction through the medium of fashion, to each other, and teach the sciences to common capacities as easily as religion, but have been perhaps the parents of much useful discovery to the whole world. I am, &c. Bristol, 2d June, 1829. G. CUMBERLAND. APRIL-JUNE, 1829. |