308 Mr. F. A. Bather on British Fossil Crinoids. 



Thus far work had chiefly been done on the Palaeozoic 

 Crinoids, and some of this is improved upon by F. M'Coy in 

 his ' Description of the British Palaeozoic Fossils in the 

 Geological Museum of the University of Cambridge ' (1851). 

 But English workers in the latter half of the century have 

 rather withdrawn their attention from these earlier forms, 

 and the works to which chief reference must now be made 

 are those by L. G. de Koninck, to whom many of our Car- 

 boniferous genera and species are due, and the ' Iconographia 

 Crinoideorum in stratis Sueciae siluricis fossilium ' of N. P. 

 Angelin (1878), the Crinoids proper edited by G. Lind- 

 strom. In this latter work only one actually British specimen 

 is described, Periechocrinus inter radiatus, and that probably 

 not a good species : but, as it is well known how close a con- 

 nexion exists between the British and Scandinavian Silurian 

 deposits, we may expect to find other of Angelin's species 

 represented in this country. A visit to Sweden during the 

 present year will I hope enable me to settle some of the ques- 

 tions that at present vex the minds of many English students. 

 If, however, British workers have not of late done much on 

 Palaeozoic Crinoids, some good work stands to the credit of 

 W: H. Baily, K. Etheridge, Jun., J. G. Grenfell, W. P. 

 Sladen, and above all J. Rofe, whose well illustrated papers 

 in the 'Geological Magazine' (1865, 1869, 1871, 1873) 

 added much to our knowledge of the structure of Carboni- 

 ferous forms. Many names of more or less value are due to 

 the l Catalogue of Fossils in the Woodwardian Museum,' by 

 J. W. Salter (1873). 



The year 1850 saw the Cretaceous Crinoids attacked by 

 E. Forbes in F. Dixon's ' Geology of Sussex,' a piece of 

 work by no means so good as his ' Monograph of the Echino- 

 dermata of the British Tertiaries ' (1852). Some Liassic 

 Crinoids have been described by F. M'Coy (1848) and T. 

 Wright (1854) in the ' Annals and Magazine of Natural 

 History,' and by Tate and Blake in ' The Yorkshire Lias ' 

 (1876). During the last ten years almost the only writer 

 has been P. H. Carpenter, who has chiefly confined himself 

 to the Comatulidae. 



