i. PLOT. LHW7D. 3 



Edward Lhwyd, who in 1690 succeeded Plot, has left us a 

 special work on organic remains which had been collected in the 

 Ashmolean Museum. In the Lithophylacium Britannicum we have 

 an account of fossils of a remarkable character which he had found 

 or had received from his friends, and arranged in cabinets in the 

 Museum. The number of specimens referred to is 1766, and the 

 descriptions are aided by twenty-five plates of figures, besides some 

 woodcuts. In this remarkable volume, the localities of fossils which 

 most frequently meet the eye are found in the vicinity of Oxford ; 

 but Lhwyd extended his researches to South Wales, Somerset, 

 Gloucestershire, Northamptonshire, and most parts of England, 

 and by correspondence was made acquainted with discoveries in 

 Germany. 



About half the localities mentioned by Lhwyd are found within 

 a distance of twenty miles from Oxford, and among these the most 

 prolific quarries and pits are still the favourite haunts of the col- 

 lector Stonesfield, Bullingdon, Cowley, Garsington, Wheatley, 

 Cumnor, Faringdon, Islip, Marcham, Thame, continually occur. 

 Shotover, indeed, is but rarely mentioned ; perhaps the clay-pits on 

 the slope of the hill were not then opened, or not much worked in 

 that age of stone-building. It is indeed to the prevalent habit of 

 employing the ' freestone ' for building through all the oolitic country 

 that we owe the greater part of the fossils of this district. It is per- 

 haps remarkable that no 'large bones ' are noticed from Stonesfield, 

 which was already famous for its * glossopetrae ' and other remains 

 of fishes, and yielded continually abundance of ' slat ' stone for the 

 roofs of colleges and houses in Oxford. 



The district which it is the purpose of the following pages to 

 describe in its geological relations, has been not merely traversed 

 but diligently examined by many eminent persons following in the 

 steps of the early explorers who have been named ; and many de- 

 tached essays have contributed to illustrate the structure of the 

 country and its fossil contents. But there has been no complete 

 or connected view of either. 



Toward the close of the last century, William Smith, a native 

 of Churchill, in Oxfordshire d , following the profession of a civil 



d Memoirs of William Smith, LL.D. His birth-year was 1769 deatjh in 1839. 



B 2 



