10 THE EEADEE 



There are chaptei*3 in this little volume which will, 1 am 

 afraid, be deemed too prolix by the general reader, and 

 which yet the geologist would like less were there any por- 

 tion of them away. They refer chiefly to organisms not 

 hitherto figured nor described, and must owe their modi- 

 cum of value to that very minuteness of detail which, by 

 critics of the merely literary type, unacquainted with fossils, 

 and not greatly interested in them, may be regarded as a 

 formidable defect, suited to overlay the general subject of 

 the work. Perhaps the best mode of compromising the 

 matter may be to intimate, as if by beacon, at the outset, 

 the more repulsive chapters ; somewhat in the way that the 

 servants of the Humane Society indicate to the skater who 

 frequents in winter the lakes in the neighbourhood of Edin- 

 burgh, those parts of the ice on which he might be in dan- 

 ger of losing himself. I would recommend, then, readers 

 not particularly palseontological, to pass but lightly over the 

 whole of my fourth and fifth chapters, with the latter half 



