ii6 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of Pengellj's geological investigations previous to his engaging in 

 systematic cave exploration. They embraced fields chiefly in Devon- 

 shire and Cornwall, and afforded subjects for correspondence and 

 discussion with many of the most eminent British geologists, and 

 some of other countries than England. A study of some fossil fish, 

 first observed by Mr. Charles W. Peach in Cornwall, furnished the 

 occasion for one of his first recorded papers, On the Ichthyolites of 

 East Cornwall, in the Transactions of the Royal Geological Society 

 of East Cornwall, 1849-'50; and a single volume — the seventh — of 

 these Transactions contains nine of his papers. Another subject of 

 interest was the beekites, curious formations of chalcedonic silica on 

 the limestone fragments in the New Eed Sandstone of Devonshire, 

 first observed by Dr. Beek, of Bristol, concerning which he read a 

 paper at the Cheltenham meeting of the British Association, the first 

 which he attended, in 1856. In 1860 he completed the formation of 

 a collection of Devonian fossils from Devon and Cornwall, which was 

 presented by the Baroness Burdett-Coutts to the new museum of 

 the University of Oxford, in connection with the foundation of a 

 geological scholarship, and was named " the Pengelly Collection." 



The first of the more important geological researches with which 

 Pengelly's name is intimately associated was the exploration of the 

 peculiar formation at Bovey Tracey, for the identification of its fossils 

 and the determination of its age. The plain in which the formation 

 lay had an aspect suggesting the basin of an ancient lake, and its 

 deposits, " very different from the solid rocks of the surrounding 

 hills," confirmed the suggestion. They consisted of gravels, sands, 

 and clays, distinctly stratified, with seams of lignite, for which 

 they had been worked. The pits had already attracted some notice, 

 and the deposits had been mentioned in scientific literature, but 

 very little had been learned concerning their age. In 1860 the 

 subject was mentioned by the late Dr. Falconer, an eminent paleon- 

 tologist, to Miss Burdett-Coutts as one the investigation of which 

 would be a boon to science. Miss Coutts supplied the money that 

 was needed, and the direction of the systematic investigation was in- 

 trusted to Pengelly; on learning which, Sir Charles Lyell wrote to 

 him : " I am very glad of the prospect of our knowing something of 

 the Bovey coal plants. It is almost a reproach to English geology 

 that they have been so little explored, as they are perhaps the only 

 fossils of the Tertiary period to which they belong." In order to 

 determine accurately the nature, thickness, and order of the successive 

 beds, and to make a satisfactory collection of fossils, a new section 

 of the deposit was made, measuring one hundred and twenty-five feet, 

 down to the bottom of a seam of lignite four feet in thickness, the 

 •'* last bed " of the workmen, but not at the actual base of the deposit. 



