344 FOSSIL REPTILES. 



zealous assiduity of our scientific countrymen that the discovery, 

 description, and determination of them are principally owing. 

 They have spared no pains in the collection of remains, or in 

 putting them together as well as the state of the fragments 

 would permit. This is a tribute to their merit which the Baron 

 Cuvier himself, with all the characteristic liberality of genius, 

 most willingly pays, and we have made but little alteration in 

 his language in repeating it. 



We shall soon see, notwithstanding the anomalies of struc- 

 ture in these extraordinary animals, that they approximate 

 more to the lizards than to any other genus. We shall begin 

 with the 



Ichthyosaurus, 



It is to Sir Everard Home that the scientific world owes its 

 first knowledge of a characteristic specimen of this singular 

 genus. He published, in the Philosophical Transactions of 

 1814, a description of a very well preserved head, and some 

 other bones, deposited in Bullock's Egyptian Museum, in Pall- 

 Mali. They came from the coast of Dorset, between Lyme and 

 Charmouth. They were taken from a rock twenty or thirty 

 feet above the level of the sea. 



Sir Everard quickly observed that the shoulder exhibited 

 some relations with that of the crocodile ; but the position of 

 the nostrils, the circle of osseous pieces, surrounding the 

 sclerotic tunic of the eye, appeared to him, as also did the ver- 

 tebrae, to present some approximations to the class of fishes. 

 On this account, M. Koenig, of the British Museum, conceived 

 for it the name of ichthyosaurus, literally fish-lizard. 



Two years after, in the Transactions for 1816, Sir Everard 

 added many details to his first description. Mr. Johnson, a 

 native of Bristol, who for many years had been in the habit of 

 collecting fossils from the cliffs of Lyme, procured for him some 

 specimens from which he deduced the form of the articulation 

 of the ribs, the shoulder-blade and the entire anterior fin, which 



