Obituary— Mr. C. J. A. Meyer. 47 



Birds." Always a careful and patient observer, he acquired a close 

 acquaintance with the habits and song-notes of British birds, and 

 never ceased to take an interest in them. 



In July, 1857, he was appointed to a post in the Accountant 

 General's Office of that time, in a division which was subsequently 

 transferred to the Chancery Courts under the title of the Supreme 

 Court Pay Office. At that time his family lived near Godalming, 

 and his attention was attracted to the fossils to be found in an old 

 quarry in the Lower Gi'eensand near the house. These interested 

 him so much that he began to study them and the rocks containing 

 them, and this laid the foundation of that interest in geology which 

 bore good fruit in after years. From that time he always devoted 

 his short holidays to visiting places of geological interest, chiefly 

 along the south coast, and almost always where rocks of Cretaceous 

 age were to be seen. 



He had a remarkably keen eye for fossils, and knew the value of 

 recording the exact bed from which they came ; hence his notebooks 

 contain carefully measured sections, and his published papers show 

 that he had always the correlation of beds in different places before 

 his mind. 



He gradually gathered together a fine collection of Cretaceoits 

 fossils, comprising many thousand specimens, obtained entirely by 

 his own hands. It comprises fossils from the Lower Greensand, 

 Gault, ' Upper Greensand,' and Blackdown Beds, from the Devon- 

 shire Cenomanian, and from the several stages of the Chalk, and it 

 contains many unique specimens. This collection, by the generosity 

 of his sister. Miss C. Meyer, has been presented to the University of 

 •Cambridge, together with a smaller but fine collection of London 

 Clay fossils collected by his brother, Mr. Christian H. Meyer, C.E., 

 during the dockyard extension works at Portsmouth. 



The first paper published by Mr. C. J. A. Meyer was a note on 

 the age of the Blackdown Beds in 1863, and from that time to 1878 

 he contributed frequently to the pages of the Geological Magazine 

 and of the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society. A list of 

 his papers is given below, but two of the most notable may be 

 specially mentioned. 



In his paper " On the Relations of the Wealden and Punfield 

 Formation " he took a view which was opposed to that held by 

 another well-known geologist, and maintained it with such success 

 that it is now generally accepted as correct. 



His paper on the Cretaceous Eocks of Beer Head is really a very 

 condensed account of his exploration of the Devon cliffs from 

 Sidmouth to Lyme Regis. He visited this coast again and again, 

 collecting carefully from every bed in the succession; and as he 

 was practically the first to explore this fine collecting ground, he 

 obtained a lai-go number of excellent specimens, especially from 

 those beds which he numbered 10, 11, and 12, and which lie at the 

 base of the Chalk. He continued to collect from these clifi's for 

 many years after the publication of his paper, and the value of his 

 researches was acknowledged by Messrs. Jukes-Browne and W. Hill 



