

PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. Ixix. 



chipping had been met with until Mr. Clement Reid found four. 

 One was worked across and another very finely serrated. This 

 minute "rat-tooth" working has been found elsewhere in Britain 

 and in India, and may help to give some clue to the identity of 

 these early occupants of the district. The tufa, which is about eight 

 feet thick, must have taken a long time to form, and shows traces of 

 the same race throughout. In addition to flint-flakes and charcoal 

 there are bones of ox, deer, and pig, but no remains of cultivated 

 plants. The marine shells are those which are now found between 

 high and low watermarks on rocky shores, such as Chapman's Pool. 

 The coast in those days probably extended farther south, and had 

 an estuary at its lowest extremity. The absence of cockles makes 

 it improbable that they were brought from Poole Harbour, which 

 probably did not exist during the deposition of the bed. Mr. A. 

 Smith Woodward's paper on the fish found by the Secretary in the 

 Oxford Clay at Chickerell shows the persistency of the genus 

 Plwlidopliorus through several geological epochs from its first 

 appearance in the Trias to its last in the Purbecks. There are four 

 species from Lyme Regis in the British Museum, one from the 

 Oxford Clay of Wiltshire, and one from the Purbeck Beds of 

 Swanage. The Chickerell fossil is too imperfect to identify it 

 with the Wiltshire specimen. Some of its elements are so similar 

 to P. macrocephalus, from the Lithographic Stone (Kimmeridge 

 Clay) of Bavaria, that Mr. Smith Woodward thinks it might be 

 identical. A head of this genus has been found in the Kimmeridge 

 Clay, of Kimmeridge, in this county. The sub-orders Ganoidei 

 and Teleostei are no longer regarded as scientifically defined groups, 

 but they sufficed until palaeontologists became better acquainted 

 with the extinct forms. The Ganoidei, which had enamelled scales 

 and the skeletons for the most part cartilaginous, overlap the 

 Teleosteans, whose skeletons are ossified in the family Isospondyli, 

 in which both are represented, some having enamelled scales and 

 cartilaginous skeletons and others more ossified skeletons, as 

 Pholidophorus. The Perch is perhaps the most highly specialised 

 of this section. 



