A YORKSHIRE NATURALIST 55 



obtained in those days on various parts of the York- 

 shire coast. In more recent times I have travelled 

 over the same ground without discovering a single 

 fossil worth carrying away. On one late occasion, 

 when twitting one of my Scarborough friends with 

 the absence of the geological energies displayed by 

 the townsmen of my earlier days, he retorted very 

 truthfully, " It is all very well for you fellows to 

 " reprove us in that way, seeing that you cleared 

 " the coast so completely that you left us nothing 

 "to do." 



Besides my father and Mr. Bean, we had at 

 Scarborough in those days a class of working men 

 who devoted most of their time to collecting these 

 fossils for sale. One called Rudd or Reed, and 

 another whom we always recognised by the name of 

 Irish Peter, were long known as the most skilful of 

 their class, and who also well knew the worth of a 

 new fossil when they found one. It was mainly by 

 the labours of these two men that Mr. Leckenby 

 brought together the fine collection of Oolitic 

 fossils afterwards purchased by Sedgwick, and now 

 in the Cambridge Museum. There were at the 

 same time a few similar men in the coast towns of 

 Bridlington, Filey, and Whitby. But at the latter 

 place Messrs. Young and Bird, the former geologist 

 the latter artist, were also accumulating the collection 

 now preserved in the Whitby Museum, and writing 

 the work which in 1822 they published conjointly, 

 under the name of "A Geological Survey of the 



