ENIGMATICAL FLINT BODIES BEARING THE NAME PARAMOUDRA. 213 



internal organization sufficient to develop the habits and 

 character of the original bodies whose external features are 

 so distinctly preserved. The central aperture was calculated 

 to allow water to have access to the interior of the animal, 

 as is the case in many hollow sponges which have large 

 single tubes passing into their centre, and usually closed at 

 their lower extremity. It is possible that the Paramoudra, 

 having a tube with two apertures, may have possessed a 

 character intermediate between a sponge and an ascidian. 

 I have broken many of these fossils, and only in one found 

 the smallest trace of organization, and this trace, I think, 

 must have been due to an accidental inclosure of a foreign 

 organic body. 



The mineral history of the Paramoudra seems intimately 

 connected with that of many other spongiform bodies which 

 we find in chalk-flints. In all these cases the organic bodies 

 thus preserved appear to have been lodged in the matter of 

 the rock while in the state of a compound pulpy fluid, and 

 before that separation of the flinty from the calcareous 

 ingredient which has given origin to the flints in chalk. 



The date of Dr. Buckland's above communication on 

 Paramoudras to the Geological Society was at a time when 

 my opportunities for making geological observations were 

 limited to the out-door excursions of my nurse, for I was 

 then passing through that interesting stage of human evolu- 

 tion known as the long clothes period ; and, as in that day, to 

 record hi print any facts or opinions brought forward in dis- 

 cussion at the meetings of the Geological Society was regarded 

 as an inexcusable misdemeanour, I am wholly unable 

 to find what kind of reception was given to Dr. Buckland's 

 paper on the occasion of its being read at a meeting of the 

 Geological Society. But what greatly surprises me is this — 

 that Dr. Buckland after the publication of his remarkable 

 discovery seems never to have followed it up. I should have 

 expected that the Doctor, filling as he did the Chair of 

 Geology in the University of Oxford, would have felt it 

 incumbent upon him at an early day after his return from 

 Ireland to have travelled to Norwich and in the chalk 

 quarries of Whitlingham and Horstead have seen how far 

 the Paramoudras of the Norfolk chalk agreed with or 

 differed from the Paramoudras of the chalk of Ireland ; and 

 then I should, moreover, have expected that he would have 

 put himself in correspondence with foreign geologists and 

 have learned whether Paramoudras were known in more 



