Hawkhis's Ichthyosauri and Plesiosauri. 477 



many of the midland counties, from Dorsetshire to Yorkshire, 

 are peculiarly rich in these fossil remains ; in some parts the 

 animals appear to have perished by a sudden catastrophe, 

 which has broken the bones into numberless fragments, and 

 scattered them through particular strata, as in the cliffs at 

 Aust Passage, near Bristol ; in other situations, the remains 

 of nearly entire skeletons have been found, which are evidently 

 near the situations in which the animals expired. The bones 

 are commonly so closely embedded in the stone, that the dif- 

 ficulty of preserving them entire is often very great, added 

 to which, the quarrymen frequently destroy large portions of 

 the skeleton, before they are aware of its occurrence : the 

 vast size of some of these animals is such, " extending many 

 a fathom," that the head may be found in one part of the 

 quarry, while the remote extremities may be buried in another 

 part which may not be wanted for some years to come. Owing 

 to these difficulties it is, that good specimens of entire skele- 

 tons or even of large portions of them, are so rare in collec- 

 tions at present. Mr. Hawkins, the author of this work, has 

 for some years distinguished himself as a " mighty hunter," 

 a fossil Nimrod. Unlike, however, to the heroes and hunters 

 of the fabulous ages, whose labours were directed to the de- 

 struction of monsters, our modern Nimrod is engaged in 

 restoring their dislocated limbs, and joining heads to their 

 cervical vertebrae again, after having lain dissevered for 

 countless ages. The present volume contains an ample ac- 

 count of the difficulties which Mr. Hawkins has had to en- 

 counter among the quarries and quarrymen in the county of 

 Somerset, near Wells and Glastonbury, where his discoveries 

 have been chiefly made. Many persons may deem the con- 

 versations with the quarrymen, given in the Somersetshire 

 dialect, more amusing than instructive, and altogether mis- 

 placed in a work on science. The author himself confesses 

 that he has, for his own pleasure, departed occasionally from 

 the conventional forms of writing, but we would willingly 

 pardon him on this head, for the very valuable service which 

 he has rendered to the student of fossil geology. 



The lithographic plates in the present volume are of large 

 size, and well executed, and display with much clearness 

 the osteology of the several species of fossil Ichthyosauri and 

 Plesiosauri in the author's possession ; indeed, they convey 

 almost as distinct information as we could obtain from the 

 specimens themselves. The anatomical details given in the 

 description of the plates are good as far as they extend, but 

 we could have wished them to have been more ample. The 

 drawing in plate 3, represents an entire skeleton of the Ichthyo- 



