Description of Some Cincinnati Fossils. 



were originally found. (The place has been covered with 

 houses for the past twenty years or more). Three or four 

 bushels of the dirt and friable materials were collected, sent 

 home in an express wagon, and the minute fossils carefully 

 washed out. Subsequently , a large lot of the minute fossils, 

 as will be seen on page 139, of Volume I, of the Ohio Palaeon- 

 tology, were presented to the Smithsonian Institution, subject 

 to their use, by Prof. Meek, for the Ohio Geological Survey, 

 and among these were numerous specimens of what it was 

 supposed Hall had called Nucula ob/iqua. Meek had no 

 hesitation in coming to the conclusion that the fossil did not 

 belong to the genus Nucula. He had grave doubts about it 

 belonging to Tellinomya^ and when he described it he called 

 it Tellinomya f obliqua. He described it with, "hinge un- 

 known." And he expressed the opinion that it would be 

 a Tellinomya, if the hinge which he had not seen "is 

 crenulated." Later this species was found in great abund- 

 ance on slabs, at an elevation of about 175 feet above low- 

 water mark, near Plainville, in Hamilton County; from fifty 

 to one hundred specimens sometimes occurring on a single 

 slab, and following this, in 1874, it was republished in the 

 Cincinnati Quarterly Journal of Science,- p. 229, under the 

 name of Tellinomya / obliqua, and it was said that " it should 

 be regarded as a common fossil." The authors of this paper 

 can each say he has examined thousands of specimens of the 

 species obliqua and that he has never seen any evidence of a 

 crenulated hinge line. Moreover, it has been a matter of 

 common observation among collectors for the past twenty or 

 twenty-five years that it is strange that no one has ever found 

 the hinge of this little species. 



Fifteen years or more ago, Prof. J. P. MacLeau collected a 

 lot of fossils in the northern part of Butler County, and one 

 of the authors collected the same species in considerable 

 abundance in the same geological range, near Versailles, 

 Indiana, which were figured and discribed in 1889, under the 

 name of Palaoconcha faberi. The particular specimens illus- 

 trated, and on which the genus and species were founded, are 

 in the collection of Mr. Faber, and have never been in the 

 possession of S. A. Miller since he wrote the definition, in 

 the Spring of 1889. Other specimens from both typical 



