26 THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE 
Roderick Murchison in his Presidential address to 
the Geological Society, when he reported her own 
publication (Murchison, 1832:373). In an obituary’ 
Mantell recorded: 
For more than a quarter of a century Miss Benett, 
pursued with ardour and success the investigation 
and collection of the organic remains of her native 
county; contributing also by her pencil and pen, to 
the illustration of the geology of Wiltshire. To her 
zeal and talents, and the liberal encouragement she 
gave the local collectors, we are in a great measure 
indebted for our knowledge of the fossils of the chalk 
and green sand of Wiltshire, and more particularly of 
those in the neighbourhood of Warminster and 
Tisbury. 
Ultimately, persuaded by her brother John 
Benett, she produced a ‘Catalogue of Wiltshire 
Fossils’ as part of The Modern History of South 
Wiltshire, that listed their occurrence. Her 
involvement in this publication is first mentioned 
in a letter to Mantell on 23 March 1818 in which she 
explained the circumstances and mentioned all 
those engaged in producing this ‘Picnic’ history of 
the county. Her various geological friends had 
encouraged her to undertake the geological section 
and with their assistance and her own ‘pretty 
extensive collection’ she had agreed — exclaiming, 
‘So there you see, I am fairly in for it!’ Even this 
early, she intended that the ‘Geology’ would also be 
published as a separate study from the whole 
county history. In a letter to Mantell on 4 July 1831, 
Miss Benet declared, ‘I am much flattered by the 
favorable opinion which you express of my little 
book,’ despite the errors made in printing that she 
had had to correct by pen herself. The detailed list 
of fossils fills nine pages and there are three plates 
of the better and more curious specimens. The 
author uses two letters, the first dated 25 April 1831 
as an Introduction, the second dated | January 1831 
as a Preface. In the second, written to Sir Richard 
Colt Hoare, the editor, she gave a general account of 
the geological formations that had been recognised 
in the county and her observations on their 
relationship to those elsewhere in England. For 
each formation she listed the localities and 
provided a gazetteer of the fossiliferous exposures 
available at that period at Warminster, Heytesbury, 
Tisbury, Bradford and elsewhere. Of particular note 
was the famous site at Chute Farm, near Longleat, 
of a field called Brimsgrove that William 
Cunnington described, ‘as if a cabinet had been 
emptied of its contents, so numerous, and so 
various were the Organic Remains that could be 
found there’. 
Unmarried, as a young woman she had both the 
time and resources to participate in the developing 
science of geology and adopt William Smith’s 
stratigraphical principles when collecting.° The 
Lower Cretaceous sedimentary rocks of Southern 
England are variable in occurrence, lithology and 
palaeontology, but through the fossils that they 
collected and exchanged, Mantell, Miss Benett and 
others gradually reached a mutual interpretation of 
the relationship of the exposures that existed in 
their own neighbourhoods, close to modern 
understanding. In most years she endeavoured to 
spend a month or so in London — ‘as it is the only 
jaunt of pleasure I have in the year’ (4 June 1822); 
but during the Autumn stayed at Weymouth, 
‘where I cannot help collecting the fine fossils . . . 
though I have had such quantities of them... (11 
Dec. 1831). On one occasion, rejecting Mantell’s 
suggestion to visit Portland she commented (2 
November 1835): 
A lady going into the quarries is a signal for the men 
begging money for beer, and the few times I have 
been there I never got a specimens worth bringing 
home. All my Portland fossils have been purchased in 
Weymouth! 
Later, she had far less time available for she wrote 
on 27 February 1833: ‘I am one of the working Bees 
in our family Hive’, and for the last twenty years of 
her life was often incapacitated by illness, when, ‘. . 
. I was not equal to the fatigue of searching for [the 
fossils] myself’? (12 Apr. 1824). She was always 
prepared to pay a reasonable price for specimens 
and had also employed collectors to work on her 
behalf; locally there was John Baker’ — mentioned 
as her ‘best collector’, or ‘my man at Warminster’. 
She also employed several others at Tisbury, and 
local residents in Dorset, for there are references to 
‘my man at Weymouth’ and ‘my collector at 
Christchurch’ [ possibly Miss Beminster, who also 
sent many specimens to the Sowerbys].° 
Miss Benett’s collection was of some 
consequence in her own time, given both its size 
and diversity, and its value in clarifying the 
occurrence of particular fossils. One result was that 
there were frequent visitors to her home at Norton 
Bavant, who arrived by the Bath to Salisbury coach. 
She informed Mantell in August 1838: 
there are one or two Coaches pass this House daily 
between 10 and 11 o’clock .. . and we frequently meet 
