1858 ROCK-CATALOGUE OF MUSEUM \JERMYN STREET 259 



upon him which was unknown in the older days of the 

 Survey. Sir Roderick Murchison had arranged that 

 each of the one-inch maps, as it was published, should 

 be accompanied with an explanatory memoir, so that 

 the public might be put in possession of the chief data 

 used in the construction of the map, and of the infor- 

 mation needful for its proper interpretation. These 

 memoirs were to be edited by the Local Director from 

 the manuscript notes supplied to him by the officers 

 who had surveyed the ground. He sometimes had to 

 furnish additional material from observations of his 

 own, and the amount of editorial supervision was thus 

 often exceedingly heavy. Then the great Memoir on 

 North Wales still dragged its slow length along. 

 From various causes, but chiefly from the want of 

 sufficiently full notes by one or two of his colleagues, 

 Ramsay had been unable to make rapid progress with 

 this large and detailed volume ; though it had been for 

 so long his chief indoor employment, and though he 

 again in the autumn of 1858 took a house in Scotland 

 for three months, this time at St. Andrews, in order to 

 push it forward. 



Another task occupied some part of his thought 

 and time. He had planned a descriptive catalogue of 

 the rock-specimens in the Survey collection in the 

 Jermyn Street Museum, and while assigning certain 

 portions of it to three of his colleagues, had kept the 

 main share of the work in his own hands. As ulti- 

 mately published, this volume formed an excellent 

 compendium of British geology. In particular, the 

 account of the successive volcanic episodes in the 

 Palaeozoic period in Britain was by far the best which 

 up to that time had appeared, and it was mainly the 

 work of Ramsay himself. 



