Prof. BucKLAND on Coprolites. 229 



yet seen no Coprolite in specimens of the bony breccia from these four last 

 localities. The late Rev. J. J. Conybeare gave me specimens of the same 

 breccia from the lias in a shaft dug in the year 1808 at Bath Easton, in fruit- 

 less pursuit of coal ; in these specimens I now recognize Coprolites ; and in 

 a mass of lias breccia^ which I collected a long time since at the base of 

 Broadway Hill near B^vesham, I find the brecciated character is due also to an 

 accumulation of Coprolites. 



This remarkable phaenomenon of a stratum of stone many miles in extent^ 

 and many inches in thickness, and in which sometimes one fourth part of the 

 whole substance is made up of balls of Coprolite, seems explicable only by its 

 position in the lowest region of the great formation of the lias, a position 

 which must for a long time have been the bottom of an ancient sea, and the 

 receptacle of the feeces and bones of its inhabitants, the cloaca maxima, as it 

 were, of primaeval Gloucestershire. This period must have occupied the interval 

 between the termination of the red marl, and the beginning of the deposit of 

 the lias formation, and the earthy sediments then deposited must have been 

 inconsiderable in the districts we are now speaking of. In the sediments 

 which next succeeded, and of which the great mass of the lias formation is 

 composed, there is no such abundant accumulation of Coprolites in any single 

 thin stratum, but they occur insulated and dispersed in the slaty clay and 

 stone, or included within the skeletons of the Ichthyosauri*. The fact of so 

 many of these skeletons being those of young animals, proves that they did 

 not die in the course of nature from infirmity or age; and the entire condi- 

 tion both of young and old skeletons shows that they perished suddenly, and 

 were buried immediately after their death ; they would otherwise have fallen 

 to pieces, and been dispersed like the bones in the breccia at Westbury and 



* Among the strat.x at Lyme that most abound in bones, is a bed of marl about three feet thick, 

 in which Sauro-coprolites are chiefly found, but even in this bed they are far and widely dispersed ; 

 in one case only Miss Anning has found two Coprolites together, and these were close to the 

 skeleton of an Ichthyosaurus, as if they had been voided by it in the struggles of death. In the 

 cliff a quarter of a mile west of the Port of Lyme in the lias marl, above the strata that most 

 abound in the remains of Saurians, I found one bed of stone-lias about 6 inches thick, in which 

 was a congeries of small Coprolites, irregular and subangular, like those in the bone-bed of the 

 Severn district, and so different from those which are associated with the large Saurians in the 

 lower parts of the lias, that I imagine them to be derived from fishes or Cephalopodes, or some 

 other unknown animals; they are, however, important, as affording a geological chronometer 

 whereby we mark at least one short interval in the deposition of the lias marls, during which 

 they must have been accumulated at the bottom of the then existing seas. I found no remains of 

 fishes or Saurians with them, nor any pebbles or other indications of a long period such as seems 

 to have been occupied in the formation of the coprolitic bone-bed at Westbury and Watchet. 

 Nearly the same conclusion as to short intervals between the deposition of the component parts 



