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the Curator lias been the moving, re-arranging, and in no small part 

 re-mounting and re-naming fully two-thirds of the Dorset fossils. It 

 has been a great and, of course, a burdensome task, but is now fairly 

 finished. In it the Curator has had invaluable help from the President, 

 and from the two distinguished professional geologists Mr. Jukes Browne, 

 of the Government Survey, and Mr. Smith Woodward, of the British 

 Museum (Natural History). The former has examined and in many 

 instances named or re-named a number of Dorset Greensand fossils. He 

 considers the Museum collection of these to be very remarkable, several 

 species in it being hitherto supposed to be peculiar to the Cambridge 

 Greensand. So much does he think of our collection that he induced 

 Mr. Woods, of St. John's, Cambridge, Geological Demonstrator in that 

 University, to come to Dorset to study the fossils in question, and to 

 collect similar ones at Bingham's Melcombe, Armswell, &c. Mr, Smith 

 Woodward lately visited the Museum, as he had done repeatedly before, 

 to study the Purbeck reptiles and fishes. He gave invaluable help 

 by naming and re-naming a good many specimens. He also told the 

 Curator that among the fishes there are several specimens which 

 cannot be recognised with certainty, or at all, as belonging to any 

 known species. He pronounced the Dorset Museum collection of Pur- 

 beck reptiles and fishes to be, next to that of the British Museum, out of 

 all comparison the best in the kingdom. Some work has been done by 

 the Curator among the antiquities, and many months' labour awaits him 

 in that department. In connection with some of the antiquities 

 mentioned above it is hoped that some notes on certain points connected 

 with recent unearthing of vestiges of the Dorchester Romans may be 

 fittingly offered. The large urn and the bronze armlets, all noted just 

 now, seem to be clear evidence of two Roman graves, not to mention 

 several, we may say many others, lately struck in sewer and foundation 

 digging in a certain locality here. And where exactly is that? It is 

 the counterscarp, the outer slope of the western ditch of Durnovaria ? 

 Now, no one with the slightest knowledge of Roman ways and habits 

 need be reminded that they carried out all their work with most 

 methodical exactness according to strict rules. And this was very true 

 of all connected with the laying-out and after-regulation of towns. 

 With the Romans, again, everything was fas or nefas, do-able or non- 

 do-able, in a sacred sense. And nothing was more utterly nefas than to 

 bury the dead within the pomcerium, the holy precinct of a town. And 

 thepomcerium usually included all the fortifications. Whence, then, these 

 Roman graves within the pomcerium ? And, apart from its being nefas, 

 how, on defensive grounds, could it be allowed that the fossa should 



