APPENDIX. 501 



This minute was duly read in Council, and the " Minutes of Council" 

 record the vote of thanks to the donor. 



My application, dated 25th October, 1859, for permission to add this 

 MS. to the present work, and the official reply thereto, are given in vol. i. 

 p. 296. The MS. was sent, immediately after my application, to the 

 printer by the Council of the College of Surgeons, and I received, on the 

 23rd December, 1859, a copy of the work, in 4to, in the Preface to 

 which the following reason was assigned for its not having been previ- 

 ously published : — ■ 



" This Introduction, on which Mr. Hunter had bestowed so much 

 thought and labour to within a short time of his death, revising and 

 correcting it from time to time, was not prefixed, as he had intended, 

 to the Catalogue of his Collection of Fossils, and is neither mentioned 

 nor alluded to in either of the three volumes of the ' Descriptive Cata- 

 logue of the Fossil Organic Remains' in the College Museum, published 

 respectively in 1845, 1854, and 1856. It is greatly to be regretted 

 that it was not brought under the notice, either of the Museum Com- 

 mittee, or of the Council of the College. The attention of the Council 

 was, however, unexpectedly drawn to it in 1856, when it was read from 

 the chair by the then Hunterian Professor." — Page v. 



As it was generally known that I was that Professor, and also the 

 individual to whom had been confided the preparation of the Catalogue 

 referred to, I addressed a letter, on the 29th December, 1859, to the 

 President and Council of the Royal College of Surgeons, stating the fact 

 of my having submitted to the Museum Committee, in the month of 

 February, 1855, the propriety of publishing the manuscript in question 

 in the concluding volume of the Catalogue of Fossils, then in course of 

 preparation; and recalling to their attention the fact of my having 

 brought before them the nature and importance of the MS. on Extra- 

 neous Fossils, in the Introductory Lectures to my Hunterian Course on 

 Fossil Remains, delivered in the theatre of the College on the 6th, 8th, 

 and 10th of March, 1855. 



I also pointed out that the charge insinuated against me, as the 

 Hunterian Professor and Author of the Catalogue of Fossils, of having 

 failed to bring under the notice of the Museum Committee or Council 

 of the College the existence of the Hunterian manuscript on Fossils, 

 until the year 1856, and by implication, when it was too late to append 

 it to the final volume of the Catalogue printed in that year, was based 

 upon the ascription in the above-cited Preface, of a wrong date, viz. 

 1856, for the true date, 1855, when I read the manuscript in ques- 

 tion from the Hunterian chair : and that, as the concluding volume of 

 the Catalogue was not printed when I had resigned my offices in the 



