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William CunniUgtOU, F.G-.S., died February 23rd, 1906, aged 

 92, at 58, Acre Lane, London. Buried at Nunhead Cemetery. 



He was the grandson of William Cunnington, F.S.A., the coadjutor 

 of Sir E. C. Hoare, who was born at Heytesbury, June 10th, 1813. Nine 

 years after this the family moved to Upavon, and afterwards to Devizes 

 in 1828, where the wool stapling business was from that date carried on 

 until 1868. In 1836 the business of a wine and spirit merchant was 

 added, which still flourishes at the Old Town Hall. W. Cunnington, 

 F.S.A., left three daughters, of whom Elizabeth married a cousin 

 — another William Cunnington — and became the mother of William 

 Cunnington, F.G.S., the eldest of her fourteen children. He married 

 first, in 1844, Jane, daughter of llev. Richard Elliott, Congregational 

 minister, of Devizes, by whom he had two sons and two daughters, of 

 whom Mr. William Cunnington and Miss Elizabeth Cunnington survive 

 him. His wife died in 1881, and in 1884 he married, secondly, Martha 

 B. Brodribb, d. of James Dudden Brodribb, of Bristol and Warminster, 

 who survives him. Educated at a school kept by Mr. Hatcher at 

 Salisbury, and first apprenticed to a chemist in 1831, he was brought 

 into the family business with his brothers, Henry and Edward, on his 

 father's death in 1846. In 1874 he retired from the business and lived 

 in London for the remainder of his life. His brother Henry died in 

 1887. Following in his grandfather's footsteps he began collecting 

 fossils at the age of 7, and from that date Geology became the great in- 

 terest of his life, for his interest in and knowledge of Archaeology, extensive 

 as it was, was after all a secondary interest. He was primarily a 

 geologist, and no one knew more of the Geology and Palaeontology of 

 the county than he did. He was, moreover, a born collector, and he 

 utilised to the full the unique opportunities which the formation of 

 railways and road-cuttings in the county afforded him in his best days. 

 The consequence was that he amassed a most valuable collection of over 

 20,000 specimens, and being perforce for want of room obliged to part 

 with the bulk of them when he left Devizes, he sold many thousands of 

 his finest Cretaceous and Jurassic fossils to the British Museum in 1875, 

 where before this many other specimens of his had found a home either 

 by gift or purchase. He reserved, however, for our own Museum many 

 of his choicest treasures, including some wonderful chalk and greensand 

 fossils, and a perfectly unique collection of sponge spicules and other 

 minute organisms obtained by him with infinite labour and care from 

 the interior of chalk flints. He also gave us a collection of Wiltshire 

 mammalian bones, and a remarkable series of microscopic slides of the 

 various Stonehenge rocks. To him, too, we are indebted for numbers 



