OJSr A SPINAL COLUMN OF LOXOMMA ALLMANNI. 349 



XIX. — On a Spinal Column of Loxomma AUmanni,'^' Huxley. 

 By D. Embleton, Esq., M.D., F.E.C.P. 



The subject of this paper was briefly described by our late 

 friend, Mr. Thomas Atthey, at page 46 of this volume of our 

 Transactions. Since 1884, when the first part of the Transac- 

 tions was published, the specimen has been more carefully 

 cleared of the matrix by Mr. Dinning, and a new, more detailed, 

 and exact description of it has been deemed necessary. 



Mr. Alderman T. P. Barkas, F.G.S., who presented the sub- 

 ject of this paper, in the autumn of 1887, to the Museum of 

 the Natural History Society of Northumberland and Durham, 

 informs me that it was discovered about seventeen years before, 

 by a miner named Swain, in the roof of the Low-Main Seam of 

 Coal at Newsham Colliery, near Blyth, Northumberland. It 

 was the duty of Swain and others, after the hewers had finished 

 their day's work, to take down and remove, during the night, 

 the shale which the hewers had left, and which usually overlies 

 this seam of coal, "Whilst thus employed Swain observed in 

 the overhanging shale indications of a chain of bones, which he 

 rightly took for the remains of some large animal. 



The object noticed being of unusual magnitude, he was 

 anxious and careful to obtain it in as perfect a state as possible. 

 Laying down his rough coat on the floor of the mine under the 

 position of the fossil, and gently detaching the shale in which 

 it was imbedded, he placed it carefully, in eight pieces, which 

 quite fitted each other, on his coat, and conveyed the whole 

 "out-bye," and thence to Newcastle, to Mr. Barkas, who, find- 

 ing it was a vertebral column, though much obscured by the 

 matrix in which it was imbedded, contented himself at the time 

 by working off only a portion of the matrix. 



It was noticed and figured by Mr. Barkas in 1873, in his 

 "Illustrated Guide to the Fish, Amphibian, Reptilian, and 



* The generic name is from the Greek Lo^OS, oblique, and ouixa, an eye = 

 oblique or squint eye. The specific name is from that of the well-known Professor 

 of Natural History, Dr. Allmann. 



