BRITISH TRILOBITES. 



History. — Professor Burmeister has given a very full account of the authors who 

 have written upon this subject, in his celebrated treatise on the ' Organisation of Trilobites,' 

 published at Berlin in 1843, and translated for the Ray Society by Prof. Thomas Bell and 

 the late Prof. Edward Forbes. 



A short summary of the Professor's observations will be sufficient for our purpose, for 

 the book is widely circulated, and is indeed the only summary to which we can turn for 

 full information. He has enriched it with a full bibliography collected by himself, and 

 traced the work done by successive naturalists and geologists to the time of Emmerich's 

 scientific treatise in 1839, 1 and Milne-Edwards' Catalogue, in his volumes on the 

 ' Crustacea.' 



It would seem that our own countryman Dr. Llhwyd was really the first to call attention 

 to the " regularly figured stones lately found by him," but though he referred them to " the 

 sceletons of some flat fish," he took good care to explain that " not these or any other 

 marine terrestrial bodies were really parts of animals," and he only marvelled that the 

 "Piscis Icon " should be raised above the surface of the stone " ac si verus piscis esset." 

 This view of the fossils was about as correct as most of those which followed till the time 

 of Linnaeus, although Mortimer and Da Costa had declared in favour of their crustacean 

 origin. It was Walch's ' Natural History of Petrifactions,' published at Nuremberg in 

 1771, which first brought into a focus the scattered information regarding the group, and 

 established the views of Da Costa, Linnseus, Wilckens, and other writers who had regarded 

 Trilobites as entomostraca. Walch first gave them the name of Trilobites, and Parkinson's 

 figures and the descriptions of several German authors pointed out the necessity of dis- 

 tinguishing the species. 



1 Reproduced with improvements in 1845. This is the earliest scientific arrangement of the tribe : 

 See Leonhard und Bronn's ' Jahrbuch,' 18-15. 



