298 Darbishire—Macclesfield Drift-beds. 
remark of Mr. Plant’s informer seems to me to prove. The author 
of the statement says the fragments, specially prepared with a coat- 
ing of white-lime, were shaken in a basket of gravel, to give them 
the necessary red tinge. How this rubbing could be continued to 
the requisite length without removing the white-lime is doubtful. 
But after all, instead of having a red tinge, it so happens that these 
fossils have a peculiar and constant creamy-white colour. The red- 
ness is the fruit of the story-maker’s own confusion between the 
‘gravel’ according to the ordinary notions of gravel, and the gravel 
of the Macclesfield Drift-beds, which is a bright clean shingle. 
That certain frauds have been more or less clumsily perpetrated, 
there is no doubt; but Irepeat that they have not been such as to 
impose on a skilled and wary observer. They ought not, therefore, 
to be published without the definition of the true fossils, which, 
when shown to be reliable, constitute a material addition to the 
long and far-from-complete array of facts on which, sooner or later, 
a true theory of the Drift is to be founded. 
Such frauds are, after all, not more than the ordinary fossil-buyer 
has been exposed to ever since and wherever there has been a 
market for specimens. The warning which Mr. Plant has repeated 
will save some unskilful collectors from loss and disgrace. It was 
never more needful than now-a-days, when so much is stated and 
published with an assumption of scientific acumen and authority 
which most seriously deranges the deliberate progress of true science. 
Before I refer you to the specimens themselves, it is only fair to 
the officers of the Museum of Practical Geology in Jermyn Street, to 
point out that they were the first to indicate the fact of the supply 
of spurious specimens ; and. to the gentlemen who preside over the 
Museum of the Philosophical Society and the Free Museum in 
Liverpool, to state that neither of them have ever seen the Maccles- 
field fossils. We at Manchester have certainly not been deceived 
on the subject. as, 
If I seem to have taken up too much of the time of the Society, it 
is because the rehabilitation of a damaged reputation is necessarily 
a matter which requires a certain elaborateness of detail. The 
effort is in the present case the more needful, as the most remark- 
able fact in-connection with these Macclesfield fossils, is the occur- 
rence amongst them of certain species of southern type; a circum- 
stance so new to the phenomena of the Drift as to challenge the 
closest inquiry, even had there been no suggestion of fraudulent 
endeayour. 
A very short inspection* of the specimens will probably satisfy 
those who see them side by side, that the Macclesfield series pre- 
cisely correspond, as to their geological and zoological facies, with the 
Moel Tryfaen and Blackpool fossils, and may fairly rank with them. 
For the sake of a more elaborate proof, and of a wider audience, 
TI submit the following digested Table of all the specimens in question 
* Series of specimens are deposited in the Museums at Jermyn Street and 
Oxford. : 
