Prof. Milne- jiiQwards's Reply to Proi. Sedgwick. 471 



Mountain Limestone previously described by Prof. M'Coy in 

 your ^Annals' (1848 and 1849). We wished to lay before the 

 public, in our ' Monograph of the British Fossil Corals,' figures 

 of those species executed under our direction, and showing the 

 characters which we deemed necessary to point out. Through 

 the kindness of Mr. Davidson and Mr. Walton, we were enabled 

 to do so for the Oolitic corals, and, as stated in the passage 

 criticised by Professor Sedgwick, the omissions occasioned by 

 what we considered as a refusal of the loan of the Mountain 

 Limestone specimens belonging to the Cambridge Museum, have 

 turned out to be less prejudicial than we at first feared, in con- 

 sequence of Prof. M'Coy having since then published good figures 

 of them. We had no thought of blaming Prof. M'Coy for so 

 doing, and, as we shall now proceed to show, that circumstance 

 had nothing to do with what we complained of in our book. 



I do not therefore see any reason to induce M. Haime and 

 myself to modify the passage of our Monograph relative to the 

 refusal of the loan of the Cambridge corals, or to apologise for it. 



§ 2. Professor Sedgwick considers as being equally ill-founded, 

 and also injurious to his friend Prof. M'Coy, an opinion expressed 

 by M. Haime and myself in a note, page 151, of our Monograph. 

 This is of more consequence than the discussion about the ex- 

 tent of the refusal above alluded to, and must therefore be 

 seriously examined here. 



In that note we said — " In the beginning of his book (page 17) 

 Prof. M^Coy expresses his regret at not having been acquainted 

 with the latter publication (viz. the first Fasciculus of our Mono- 

 graph of the British Fossil Corals) early enough to be able to 

 refer to it ; and we feel much gratified in seeing that the results 

 which Prof. M^Coy appears therefore to have obtained solely 

 from his own observations, are often very similar to those pub- 

 lished by ourselves a year before ; even by a singular coincidence 

 he often makes use of the same names for the divisions pre- 

 viously established in the first part of this Monograph." 



The signification of these words must have been very clear to 

 every one conversant with the contents of the two books alluded 

 to ; but in consequence of Prof. Sedgwick's article I deem it 

 necessary to be more explicit. 



Prof. McCoy's work, the title of which is ' A detailed Systematic 

 Description of the British Palctozoic Fossils,' does not contain the 

 description of one single new species of coral, nor does the 

 author establish in it any new genera. It consists mostly in the 

 reprint of the articles published some years before by Prof. M'Coy 

 in the ^ Annals,' and duly quoted by us in our ' Monograph of 

 the British Fossil Corals.' What Prof. M'Coy added to this re- 

 print in his Systematic work, consists essentially in the plates 



