﻿HISTORY OF OBSERVATIONS. 



19 



Excepting this account of the genus Fusulina, the earliest mention of Carboniferous 

 Eoraminifera appears to be in a communication read by Dr. Buckland before the 

 Ashmolean Society of Oxford in 1841, announcing the discovery of their remains by 

 Mr. Darker and Mr. Tennant, in specimens of Mountain Limestone from Derbyshire. 

 The following is the paragraph relating to the subject in the "Abstracts of the Proceedings 

 of the Ashmolean Society." 1 



" A paper was read by Professor Buckland on the agency of animalcules in the 

 formation of limestone. Dr. Buckland began by exhibiting some polished thin slices 

 of Stonesfield Slate lately presented to him by Mr. Tennant, which Mr. Darker 

 had discovered to be crowded with microscopic shells. He also announced that 

 Mr. Darker and Mr. Tennant have discovered microscopic shells to abound in thin slices 

 of certain strata of Derbyshire limestone, and proceeded to discuss the question how far 

 the abundance of such remains in the Carboniferous and Oolitic limestones, and in the 

 Chalk and Tertiary formations justifies the revival which has been attempted since 

 the microscopic discoveries of Ehrenberg of the old and false dogma 'omnis calx e 

 vermibus ; omnis silex e vermibus ; omneferrum e vermibus.' " 



Mr. Weaver, 2 in allusion to the same subject, states that this discovery was made by 

 Mr. Tennant in 1839, and adds that in 1840 Mr. Lonsdale had also found Eoraminifera 

 in large numbers in thin slices of Kendal limestone. 



In 1842 Dr. Ehrenberg presented to the Royal Academy of Berlin a notice of 

 some Polythalamia from the Mountain Limestone of Lake Onega in Russia ; and in the 

 following year he reported to the Academy the results of his examination of a number of 

 fossiliferous deposits, amongst them a "Mountain Limestone hornstone" from Tula. 

 Little is to be gathered from the short abstracts of these papers which appear in the ' Pro- 

 ceedings of the Academy.' The whole of the determinations seem to have been revised 

 for his great work, the ' Mikrogeologie,' published a few years later, and as no important 

 question of precedence depends on the earlier communications, notice of the species 

 named in them may be left till we come to speak of the latter memoir. 



In 1845 Professor Phillips, in a paper on the " Remains of Microscopic Animals in 

 the Rocks of Yorkshire," described and figured two Eoraminifera from the Mountain 

 Limestone of that county. One of these is a doubtful Textularia which is not named by 

 the author, the other the horizontal section of a Rotaliform test, to which the name 

 Endothyra Bowmanni is appended. At best a single transparent section of a shell is not 

 a satisfactory basis on which to establish a species, still less as the foundation of a genus ; 

 but taking all the circumstances into account, there can be little doubt that the specimen 

 figured does represent a type previously undescribed, and the generic term Endothyra 

 may properly be accepted for it and its allies. Professor Phillips's specific name has been 



1 Vol. i, No. xvii, p. 35, March 2nd, 1841. 



2 'Ann. and Mag. Nat. Hist.,' vol. vii, p. 398. 



