BIOGKAPIIICAL SKETCH. 



xli 



than a chaotic heap of rubbish into a collection of fossils 

 accnratelj identified and worthy of the Capital of India. 

 In this work he pointed out the distinguishing characters 

 of the matrix of the fossils from different parts of India, as 

 follows : — 



1. Those from Ava are black and heavy, and often strongly 

 impregnated with hydrate of iron. 



2. Those from Perim Island are usually embedded in a 

 yellow marly conglomerate. 



3. The matrix of the Nerbudda specimens is white, soft, 

 friable, and adhering to the tongue, without any ferruginous 

 or calcareous infiltration. 



4. The majority of the Sewalik fossils are embedded in a 

 hard sandstone matrix, but others are black, heavy, impreg- 

 nated with iron, and scarcely distinguishable from the Ava 

 specimens.^ 



As a teacher of botany in the Medical College, Falconer 

 was eminently successful and always a great favourite with 

 his pupils. His house in Garden Reach will long be remem- 

 bered for the hospitality dispensed to the many who were 

 reckoned among his friends, and particularly to young officers 

 on their first arrival in India. In the spring of 1855 he 

 retired from the Indian service, and on his return home he 

 visited the Holy Land, whence he proceeded along the 

 Sjrrian coast to Smyrna, Constantinople, and the Crimea, 

 during the siege of Sebastopol. 



On his arrival in England he at once resumed his palseon- 

 tological researches, and in 1856 he published an essay to 

 vindicate the principle propounded by Cuvier, that the laws 

 of correlation which preside over the organization of animals 

 is the guide to the reconstruction of extinct forms. ^ His 

 time was now mainly occupied in studying the fossil species 

 of Mastodon, Elephant, Ehinoceros, and other Mammalia, 



' The writer has receired the follow- 

 ing note from Sir Proby Cautley on a 

 fossiliferous stratum lying below the 

 great sandstone and shingle deposits of 

 the Sewaliks : — ' The Kalowala Pass do- 

 posit of clay-marl in which the small 

 black (hydrate of iron) fossils were 

 found in such numbers by me, and which 

 Durand also found north (or on the 

 Himalayah side) of Nahun is a totally 



different one from that in which the 

 larger fossils were found in the upper 

 sandstone strata, and lying on the sur- 

 face amongst the detritus of the sand 

 rocks.' 



- On Professor Huxley's attempted 

 refutation of Cuvier's Laws of Correla- 

 tion in the reconstruction of Extinct 

 Vertebrate forms.—' Annals and Maga- 

 zine of Nat. Hist.,' June 1856. 



