variety of the ocean life of that period, as the mate- 
rial dredged up from the bottom of the present seas, 
did of the existing fauna. 
It was not until some time after that I had dis- 
covered this material, that I became aware that Mr. 
Joseph Wright, F. G. S. of Belfast had also, a few 
years previously, ascertained, that many of the flints © 
in the chalk of the North of Ireland, contained depo- 
sits, similarly rich in fossils, and that he had published 
a list of those which he had discovered in the con- 
tents of these stones. As, however, it did not ap- 
pear that these microzoa had been previously noticed 
in the chalk Flints of the East of England, a locality 
several hundreds of miles distant, and in strata now 
entirely discontinuous from the beds of the Irish chalk, 
I determined to work out the contents of my disco- 
very for the sake of seeing how far the fossils from 
these two places agreed with each other and with 
those of the cretaceous strata of Germany and else- 
wihtereseudher luhoped to be able to show the 
great variety of the various forms of life which in 
such a small quantity of material and from a single 
locality were mingled together in the mud of the Cre- 
taceous ocean, and consequently I resolved to limit 
my investigation to the contents of this single hollow 
flint. 
I prepared this flint meal, if thus it may be term- 
ed, by carefully washing away the finer particles; 
which reduced it when dry to about 3 or 4 ounces in 
weight. By this means the fossils were brought in- 
to a small compass, but even so, it involved pretty 
constant work for several weeks to look over and pick 
out, under a strong simple lens, the principal fossils 
