ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. lix 



history treatise. The hthographic plates illustrative of the genera of 

 Brachiopoda are also excellerit specimens of their kind, both in ex- 

 ecution and arrangement. They are remarkable, not only for their 

 fidehty, but also for their artistic merits, the more so since they are 

 the work of an amateur in art, our accomplished associate, Mr. David- 

 son, to whose generosity and zeal for science, the world of geologists 

 is deeply indebted for these admirable drawings. The former annual 

 volumes issued by the Palseontographical Society have scarcely, owing 

 to acccidental circumstances, received notice in the Anniversary 

 addresses, and I take this opportunity of oifering a word of con- 

 gratulation to the geologists of Great Britain, on the services rendered 

 to their science through this remarkable series of monographs, — 

 products of disinterested zeal and earnest co-operation. 



When the Palseontographical Society was started, its founders could 

 not have anticipated the success that has crowned its exertions, or the 

 facility with which able and enthusiastic labourers in the field of science 

 it proposed to cultivate, would have been found willing to devote 

 their gratuitous exertions to the work. Hence there has arisen an 

 inequality of plan and difference of treatment in the several mono- 

 graphs published annually, much to be regretted, but scarcely now to 

 be remedied. Where a subject mairdy of importance to a branch of 

 zoology that chiefly concerns the geologist, such as that of the 

 Brachiopodous Mollusks, is treated fully aiid completely as in the 

 volume for 1853, we are grateful for the boon, even though such a 

 treatise was foreign to the original intentions of the Society. But in 

 the majority of instances it is doubtful how far it is desirable to ex- 

 pend the resources of the Society on printing purely zoological matter 

 mixed up with the palseontological descriptions, and necessarily imper- 

 fect, and causing much repetition. Good figures and good descrip- 

 tions of fossils are the true ends to be kept in view. It is also to be 

 regretted that the Society had not started with a definite scheme of 

 monographs ; each and all should have been either stratigraphical, or 

 else systematic ; but we have now a mixture of both, which sooner 

 or later will be the cause of not a little clashing and confusion. 



The more strictly palseoutographical portion of this volume is 

 occupied by the continuations of the Monographs of British Fossil 

 Corals, bv Milne-Edwards and Jules Haime ; of MoUusca of the 

 Great Oolite, by Morris and Lycett; of the Crag Mollusca, by Searles 

 Wood ; and of the British Fossil Reptilia, by Owen, About 250 

 species of fossils of various orders are described and figured. Of 

 these about two-fifths are either wholly new to science, or else new 

 to the British Fossil Fauna — no small addition to our knowledge of 

 extinct animals to come from one Society in a year. 



In this part of the monograph of the Corals our Devonian species 

 are described and figured, British examples only being selected for 

 delineation, a precaution in a work of this character that cannot be 

 too strictly attended to, since on its essentially local or topographical 

 features much of the peculiar interest and value attached to it must 

 depend. Sad mistakes in other works have been committed through 

 the neglect of this precaution by more authors than one, and ninny a 



