Chapter V. 



HIS RESEARCHES ON FOSSILS. 



In the previous chapter I gave a quotation 

 from one of Brown's letters, in which he referred 

 with some pride to those fossils that he had 

 collected during his first six years in South Africa. 

 He may, like many an amateur, have been unduly 

 pleased with his first efforts ; let us see therefore 

 what Huxley, the great palaeontologist and 

 comparative anatomist, thought of them. In a 

 letter written to Sir R. I. Murchison, and dated 

 2nd Oct., 1866, Professor Huxley wrote: 



" My Dear Sir Roderick, Mr. Brown's box 

 was unpacked on Saturday. Of the three hundred 

 and fifty specimens, the majority consists of 

 vegetable remains with numerous fragments of 

 Dicynodonts and (I suspect) Labyrinthodonts. 

 None of these, however, are sufficiently perfect 

 to enable me to make any addition to our present 

 state of knowledge, and I was beginning to be a 

 little disappointed with my 4 haul', when I 

 discovered that, in Mr. Brown's box, as in 

 Pandora's, hope lay at the bottom. 



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