LETTER III. 1 



'To the same. 



HE fossil-shells of this district, and sorts of 

 stone, such as have fallen within my observation, 

 must not be passed over in silence. And first 

 1 must mention, as a great curiosity, a specimen 

 that was ploughed up in the chalky fields, near 

 the side of the Down, and given to me for 

 the singularity of its appearance, which, to an 

 incurious eye, seems like a petrified fish of about four inches long, 

 the cardo passing for an head and mouth. It is in reality a bivalve 

 of the Linnasan genus of Mytilus, and the species of Crista Galli ; 2 



1 This letter on the fossils of Selborne is clearly a later insertion, and is a 

 sufficiently perfunctory performance. ED. 2 White was mistaken in referring 

 this fossil, of which he gives an illustration in the first edition, to the ^Mytilus 

 crista-galli of Linnseus. It is in reality Qstraa carinata, a characteristic mollusk of 

 the Greensand. ED. 



