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presenting to his mind the “how”. and the “ why” of nature’s 
wonders. The walls themselves of the Commercial School, with 
which he was so familiar, were built up of Ammonites and 
Belemnites, locally called “ladies’ fingers;” few places could 
boast of such medals of creation as a short ramble would disclose 
in the Upper Lias strata around his native town. ‘In my school- 
boy days,” he writes in one of his early papers, ‘‘ my half-holidays 
were often spent in collecting the Ammonites with which the beds in 
the Upper Lias in the neighbourhood of Ilminster abound, for the 
purpose of rubbing them down to show their sparry chambers.” 
This amusement, however, for a time seems to have been 
forgotten on his engaging in the active bustle of life. During, 
however, his first residence in Bath (between the years 1837 and 
1844) his rambles in the quarries of our district served to revive 
his dormant taste for geology, ‘‘a taste, which once cultivated,” 
he says, ‘‘is rarely lost.” It was about this time, on his return 
to his native place, that his attention was redirected to the study 
by an incident which has often been mentioned and which seems 
to have been the chief cause of his awakened interest. ‘An old 
civic building, near tlie Commercial school-house, in which he had 
passed his early days, was being renovated, and two of the boys 
were amusing themselves with a pebble, or nodule, they nad 
found in the rubbish. This, in rolling from one to another, 
separated, and, by a lucky chance, the pieces were looked at and 
preserved. In the centre, and naturally at the point of separation, 
was a beautiful fish, of the extinct genus Pachycormus.”* This 
was the first beginning of that magnificent collection of fishes 
which now enrich the Bath Museum. Before leaving his native 
town he had accumulated most of the characteristic fossils of the 
district, and after repeated visits there, of a few days at a time, 
made himself thoroughly acquainted with its physical and strati- 
* Vide his speech at the Guildhall during meeting of British Associ- 
ation in Bath, 1864, 
