ON PHOTOGRAPHS OF GEOLOGICAL INTEREST. 303 



received. In addition to the mounting of most of the photographs 

 received during the last thi'ee years it has been necessary to unmount and 

 remount on standard, interchangeable, guarded mounts over 500 of the 

 older photographs. Considering the risk involved in this work, but little 

 real damage has been done to the prints, and the majority have come 

 through the ordeal unscathed, while not one has been irretrievably 

 damaged. Many of the descriptive forms have been rewritten and 

 expanded, and a large number which had been lost or never sent in have 

 been written up. The localities of all but two of the photographs in 

 the collection have been accurately ascertained, though there was in some 

 cases no written clue to them. Many photographs have been critically 

 examined, and additional points of interest in them have been discovered 

 and explained on the mounts or forms. The Committee express their thanks 

 to Mr. Strahan, Mi*. Lamplugh, Mr. Gibson, Mr. Leighton, Mr. Nichols, 

 Mr. Watson, Mr. Welch, Mr. Whitaker, Mr. Shipman, Mr. De Ranee, 

 Mr. Woodward, Mr. Goodchild, Mr. Brook, Mr. Hunt, and several others 

 for services in this direction. References to published descriptions and 

 plates are being filled up wherever possible. In many cases it has been dis- 

 covered that the photographs are beginning to possess a special interest 

 from the change or disappearance of the objects photographed. Thus the 

 pump at Marino, Co. Down, has been washed away, and there are photo- 

 graphs of Shakespeare Cliff before the landslip, to compare with those 

 taken since, and a print of Eccles Tower, free from sand dunes, before it 

 fell. On the other hand, the Carboniferous Forest shown in Photographs 

 33, 34, 35, and 939 has now been carefully protected by a building. The 

 beautiful section (972) showing a chalk cliff and screes buried under 

 Tertiary Basalt has been quarried away. 



Concurrently with the rearrangement a card catalogue of the whole 

 collection has been made, and this is so arranged as to minimise the future 

 labour of registering new photographs, while at the same time it secures a 

 ready means of recording localities and particulars with accui'acy. The 

 ■cards are used for acknowledgment to donors, who can thus correct 

 the particulars to be finally entered in the published lists. A county list 

 and an abbreviated numerical list have also been written, and for the first 

 time it has been possible to check the whole contents of the collection. 

 This has shown that, in spite of the difficulties of keeping a large set of 

 unmounted and miscellaneously mounted prints, only 3 per cent, of those 

 registered in the published list were not to be found, a i-esult which 

 reflects much credit on the care exercised by the former Secretary, 

 Mr. Jeffs. Quite 1, and perhaps 2, per cent, of this apparent loss is due 

 to clerical errors in entering contributions in the published lists before 

 they had been actually received ; the other 1 per cent, seems to represent 

 ■actual loss, but this is to some extent compensated by the finding of 

 photographs which had not been registered in the printed lists. The 

 good nature of the majority of the donors of the best photographs has 

 •enabled the Committee to make good almost all photographs of real 

 geological value, and at the present time not more than sixteen of the 

 photographs registered in the published lists are absent from the collec- 

 tion. The numbers of the prints which cannot be found or replaced have 

 been applied to new photographs received within the year, and thus the 

 numbering represents with fair accuracy the actual state of the whole 

 collection ; numbers below 1,400 in the list (No. 1) are those which have 

 been thus transferred, and any photographs which may be attached to 



