258 THE CANADIAN NATURALIST. [Vol. viii. 



galleries of the Jermyn Street Museum. In a letter to Sir W . E. 

 Logan, dated London, April 19th, 1858, he says, " since I have 

 been here I have examined, I may say, thousand of specimens of 

 Silurian and Devonian fossils in the different museums and am 

 astonished to find so few that are identical with our own." Con- 

 trary to my expectations, the number of species common to the 

 two sides of the Atlantic must be reduced instead of increased." 

 Of course the " our own" in this case applies only to the two 

 Provinces now called Ontario and Quebec. In April of this year 

 he was elected a Fellow of the Geological Society of London, 

 the signers of his certificate previous to the election being Sir 

 Roderick Murchison, Prof. A. Ramsay, and Prof. Huxley. 

 Soon after this he attended the annual dinner of the Society, 

 respecting which he wrote to Sir W. Logan, as follows : u the 

 Royal Hammerers had a jolly dinner a few days ago, I was there. 

 Your health was drunk and Ramsay made a great speech in 

 praise of our Survey. I returned thanks. Sir Roderick Mur- 

 chison was in the chair." Previous to his departure from 

 England he paid a short visit to Paris and inspected the Palaeo- 

 zoic corals described by Edwards and Haime; here too he met 

 the great Bohemian palaeontologist, Barrande. At the sugges- 

 tion of Prof. Huxley, Mr. Billings induced Mr. Horace S. Smith 

 to accompany him on his return voyage to Canada and to accept 

 the position of artist to the Survey. Accordingly they sailed 

 from Liverpool on the 2nd of June and arrived together in Mon- 

 treal on the 15th of that month. 



Except on an occasional visit to some fossiliferous locality not 

 far distant from the city, Mr. Billings scarcely ever left Mont- 

 real after this journey across the Atlantic, but devoted himself 

 sedulously for the remainder of his life to the study and descrip- 

 tion of the fossils in the Survey collection. The titles of his 

 writings since 1858 are too numerous to quote in full, yet they 

 afford the only true index to his intellectual labours from this 

 date. His most important separate memoirs are monographs on 

 the Cystidea, Asteroidae and Crinoidea of the Lower Silurian 

 rocks of Canada, in decades Nos. 3 and 4 of Canadian Organic 

 Remains," Montreal, 1858-59 ; Palaeozoic Fossils, Vol. I, 

 Montreal, 1865; also Vol 2, Part 1, Montreal, 1874; and 

 " Catalogues of the Silurian Fossils of the Island of Anticosti . 

 with descriptions of some new genera and species," Montreal, 

 1866. From first to last he contributed no less than ninety-three 



