14 



with on foreign seas, it would suffice to close at the present stage 

 the rough outline I have sketched of the Class Cephalopoda, but as 

 the Members of this Society care for the life-history of the past, no 

 less than for the relics of the present, it becomes incumbent upon 

 me to show that, in the ages gone before, there also lived that same 

 curious group of objects, cousins far removed in family from bur 

 modern Cuttle-fish, yet true relations every whit. 



Conspicuous amongst these were the "Thunder-stones" (fig. 6), 

 that puzzle of the 15th and 16th centuries, that once Bogey of many 

 a child in witch-haunted districts. Simj)le enough to look at, not 

 dissimilar in shape to the cedar lead-pencils of the present century, 

 to what wonders have they not borne witness — how that in the storms 



they came down from heaven, how 

 that they were the fingers of the 

 Evil One, how that they spontan- 



A common Chalk Belemnite [Belemnitella e0Usl J B P ra *S fr0m the g™und, how 

 mucronatu), about four inches in length; ri + Pm ilrt mrp fpsfprincr 



some in the Lias measure more than mat me J COUia cure iestermg 



twelve inches. wounds and other ills to which 



flesh is heir, — these strange forms, once superstitiously regarded, after- 

 wards viewed in a more reasonable light, were eventually proved to 

 be the internal bone of some of the race of the Cephalopods. 



The Belemnite, taken by itself, would of necessity be likely to 

 prove a puzzle, the more so as it has small analogy outwardly with 

 things which exist at the present day. For what have we ? — an 

 almost straight cylinder pointed at one end, conically hollow at the 

 other ; when perfect, with the conical hollow filled with another cham- 

 bered cone, partitioned with gradually decreasing lower floors, and 

 pierced by an aperture. 



It is to the late Dr. Buckland 1 that the merit is mainly due of 

 discovering the connection between the Belemnite and the Cephalo- 

 pods' internal bone, for that learned divine, working at the Lias fossils 



1 In February, 1829, Dr. Buckland read a paper before tbe Geological Society of 

 London (printed afterwards in Abstract of Proceedings Geol. Soc, vol. i. p. 97). 

 in which he argued that certain fossil ink-bags surrounded by nacreous plates (phrag- 

 mocone) discovered at Lyme Regis, in Dorsetshire, were probably portions of the 

 Belemnitic Cephalopods. Subsequently, in 1836, Dr. Buckland figured in the Bridge- 

 water Treatise (PI. 44 1 , fig. 7) an ink-bag in the midst of nacreous chambers, to 

 which chambers the ordinary Belemnite was attached, proving that the ink-bag, the 

 nacreous partitions, and the Belemnite itself were all parts of the same animal. 



