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VOL. XXX.] PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 399 



entire skeleton (as represented fig. 3, pi. 1 1) of a large animal, impressed on a 

 very hard blue clay stone ; the same as, and undoubtedly came from, the neigh- 

 bouring quarries about Fulbeck, on the western cliff of the long tract of hills 

 extending quite through the adjacent county of Lincoln. It lay, time out of 

 mind, at the side of a well near the parsonage-house, where it had served for a 

 landing-place to those that drew water; but on removal, the under- side ex- 

 hibited this unusual form. Where the remaining part of the stone may be, 

 which contained the upper-part and continuation of the skeleton, is now utterly 

 unknown : but I am persuaded it cannot be reckoned human, but seems to be 

 a crocodile or porpoise. There are ] 6 vertebrae of the back and loins, very 

 plain and distinct, with their processes and intermediate cartilages ; g whole o- 

 partial ribs of the left-side ; the os sacrum, the ileum in situ, and two thighr 

 bones displaced a little ; the beginnings of the tibia and fibula of the right-leg; 

 on one corner there seem to be the vestigia of a foot with 4 of the 5 toes, and 

 a little way off an entire toe, now left perfect in the stone : there are no less 

 than 1 1 joints of the tail, and the cartilages between them of a white colour 

 distinguishable from the rest. We should impose on our senses, to question, 

 whether these be the real relics of an animal; for the very bones themselves are 

 now to be seen as plainly, as if preserved in an Egyptian mummy. The Royal 

 Society had lately a draught of a crocodile, though a small one, found after the 

 like manner inclosed in stone, from a quarry in the mountains of Upper Ger- 

 many. 1 suppose the same reason accounts for both, and all the rest of this 

 kind of fossils. 



It is remarkable that all the stone-pits, about the same part of the country, 

 abound with prodigious quantities of shells, and the like, and the greatest part 

 of the substance of the stone is a composition of them. There are many ac- 

 counts of them in the Transactions, and this stone has many shells of different 

 kinds in it. Sir Hans Sloane has a fish- skeleton, found near this place. If we 

 look on a map of the country, and observe the Lincolnshire Alps, how they 

 run 50 miles north and south, and on the west side are steep and rocky, we 

 may see the reason why these quarries should be so stocked with shells ; for it 



on the Gout J and among his theological productions, a sermon or two. But these publications, 

 however respectable, would not alone have procured him much celebrity. His name is perpetuated 

 by labours of a different kind, viz. by his antiquarian researches j the chief of which are Itinerariura 

 Curiosum; an Account of Stonehenge and Aburyj Palseographia Sacra j Paloeographia Britannicaj 

 and the History of Carausius. Besides the above communication, there are various papers by Dr. S. 

 on antiquities, on earthquakes, on a fire-ball, &c. inserted in the 35th, 45th, 46th, 47tb, and 48th, 

 vols, of the Phil. Trans. 



Dr. S. was bom at Holbeach, in Lincolnshire, in l687, and died of the palsy in London, in 1765, 

 aged 78. 



