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one only lately passed away, Bath was considered a celebrated 

 locality, especially for oolitic deposits, and Bathonian was a term 

 adopted by continental geologists to include them all. It does 

 not seem a gracious thing to depreciate the scientific interest of 

 your own surroundings, but nevertheless it is true that the Bath 

 district would in the present day compare unfavourably both in 

 its geology and palaeontology with localities and sections which 

 were then unknown, possibly because there were no workers in 

 them to aid in their development. How meagre, for example, 

 would be the fauna of the Great Oolite of Bath as compared with 

 that at Minchinhampton ; or its thirty feet of ragged Inferior 

 Oolite here, with little but casts of shells, with its grand develop- 

 ment of 150 feet and its large fauna on the Cotteswolds ; or its 

 Upper and Middle Lias, then unknown, with their representatives 

 on the Yorkshire coast ; or the thin beds comparatively of the 

 Lower Lias with its great thickness in mid-Somerset or the 

 Dorsetshire coast. Still, we ought to be thankful to Walcott 

 for his " Bath Fossils," to Smith, Lonsdale, and others for the 

 impetus they gave to the study of geology in their day, and 

 more especially so perhaps since it is found with our increased 

 knowledge they did not quite exhaust the field, but left some 

 developments to work out for others who came after them. 



Although the Bath beds, as already suggested, cannot be con- 

 sidered typical, they still present considerable variety, but the 

 difficulty in their study arises chiefly from the fact that clear, 

 well-defined sections, except on the table land of the great oolite, 

 are seldom to be seen. The centre of the valley has been 

 denuded down to the Lower Lias, but excavations therein do not 

 usually pass below the accretions of Eoman times, so that even 

 there it is seldom seen, and less likely are the beds on the slopes of 

 the hills which are nearly everywhere covered with material from 

 the higher ground. Generally it will be found that the most 

 interesting physical scenery occurs along the lines of outcrop of 

 the several geological formations, as may be evidenced by the 



