82 Reviews—Etheridge’s Paleozoic Fossils. 
modified, owing to the progress of new paleontological discovery 
and new publications. 
In 1830 Samuel Woodward, of Norwich, published the first 
attempted list of British fossils, a little book of fifty pages octavo, 
entitled ‘A Synoptical Table of British Organic Remains,” wherein 
‘the number of recorded British fossils is given as 2008. 
Prof. John Morris published the first edition of his Catalogue of 
British Fossils in 1845, and a second edition in 1854. It must not, 
however, be overlooked that in 1848-49, between the issue of the 
first and the second edition of Morris’s Catalogue, the great work of 
Dr. H. G. Bronn, entitled ‘‘ Index Paleontologicus,” in three vols. 
Svo. (Stuttgart), had appeared. This work really formed the most 
important and correct contribution to Paleeontological nomenclature, 
giving us the most complete and accurate census of past life-forms 
ever attempted. 
The author of the present work, Mr. Etheridge, is no novice at 
the task of tabulating British fossils, as may be abundantiy proved 
from his very numerous published paleontological Appendices to 
the Memoirs of the Geological Survey (especially that to Vol. III. 
on North Wales), his great Memoir “On the Physical Structure of 
West Somerset and North Devon and on the Paleontological Value 
of the Devonian Fossils” (Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. 1867, vol. xxiii. 
pp. 568-698), and his Anniversary Addresses as President of the 
Geological Society, 1881-82. 
Mr. Etheridge also largely aided the late Dr. J. J. Bigsby, F.R.S., 
in the production of two very valuable Catalogues, one entitled — 
“Thesaurus Siluricus” (4to. 1868), and the other “Thesaurus 
Devonico-Carboniferus ” (4to. 1878). 
In Prof. Morris’s second edition are enumerated 8359 species of 
British fossils, from rocks of all ages; in the present volume, which 
gives a list of fossils recorded only from the British Paleozoic 
rocks known up to 1886, we find the number to be 6022 species, 
whilst those met with in the Neozoic formations (not included in 
the present Catalogue) number, according to Mr. Htheridge, no fewer 
than 18,000—giving a grand total for the British Islands of 19,022 
species at the date when the present list closed in 1886. 
Undoubtedly we are mainly indebted to Morris for the first really 
important critical list of British fossils, and this has been of the 
greatest use to workers in paleontology and also in stratigraphical 
geology, by directing them to those published sources of fuller 
information, such as Sowerby’s Mineral Conchology, Mantell’s and 
Dixon’s works, the Transactions and Journal of the Geological 
Society, and later to the grand series of volumes of the Paleeonto- 
graphical Society, whose vast stores of information needed such a 
Catalogue raisonnée to make them available to the ordinary working 
student seeking to arrange and name his collection and to fix with 
certainty the horizon from which he had obtained his fossils. 
Most of all do such works attain their highest usefulness when 
they can be appealed to as critical guides, and safeguards against the 
unnecessary multiplication of names in paleontology. 
