THE 
GHKOLOGICAL MAGAZINE, 
No. IV.—OCTOBER 1864. 
ORIGINAL ARTICLES. 
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T. On tHe Nature AND Origin or BANDED FLuintTs. 
By 8. P. Woopwarp, F.G.S. 
[Plates VII. and VIII. ] 
Hee idler picking up pebbles on the sea-shore, and the 
geologist breaking stones in a gravel-pit, frequently meet 
with banded flints, which display their markings like a painting 
on the smoothly fractured internal surface, or, in other cases, in 
the form of lines more or less deeply engraved on the exterior 
by the action of the weather. The bands seen in section are 
often accompanied by discolorations of fanciful shape, in which 
imaginative people find pictures of their friends and others. 
In the British Museum there are about fifty of these flints, 
chiefly Sussex specimens, from the collections of Dr. Mantell 
and Mr. Dixon; there are also examples from Germany and 
Poland; and they are most likely to be found wherever chalk- 
flint eravel occurs. Large numbers of curious eravel-flints have 
been collected by Mr. John King, of Norwich, Mr. J. W. Flower, 
of Croydon, and Dr. Bowerbank. Butthe most extensive and 
instructive collection is that of Mr. Wetherell, of Highgate, 
to whom we are indebted for the use of most of the flints 1 now 
figured. 
The origin of these flints has been a puzzle to stone-breakers 
for the last fifty years. Those with the furrowed surface were 
considered by Parkinson to be the wrinkled and petrified re- 
mains of the peduncle of the Anatifa, or Duck-barnacle. In the 
third volume of the ‘ Organic Remains,’ (p. 241, pl. 16, fig. 18) 
he figures and describes ‘such a flint as that represented i in our 
Pl. VIL, fig. 7, but quite irregular in its form. In the first 
Mantellian collection are two flints labelled in accordance with 
this view; but there is no reason to suppose their learned owner 
VOL. I.—NO. IV. L 
