PREFACE 



Robert John Lechmere Guppy was born August 15, 1836 and 

 died August 5, 19 16. Though a native of Xondon he spent the 

 greater share of his life in Trinidad. He was a great lover of 

 Natural History. In spite of grave difficulties he succeeded in 

 preparing a large number of papers for publication. To list them 

 completely would now doubtless be quite an impossible task 

 since many appeared in ephemeral publications, newspapers, and 

 are no longer extant. However the more serious paleontological 

 articles, sometimes assuming the nature of monographs, were 

 nearly all published in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological 

 Society of London or in the Geological Magazine. Between the 

 purely popular and ephemeral, and the more serious, as classified 

 above, a third class may be recognized, for the most part short 

 articles, read before local natural history societies, clubs, etcetera, 

 often semi-popular in nature but sometimes containing remarks 

 on, or descriptions of new fossil species. Some of these too went 

 abroad to the English Journals, although first appearing in the 

 "Proceedings" of some local society. 



In preparing the following reprint, such articles of the third 

 class, mentioned above, have been selected, as were not repub- 

 lished abroad, or, at least not republished in the same wording 

 or in easily accessible volumes. In other words an attempt is 

 here made to give to the scientific public an exact reprint of such 

 of Guppy' s papers as were printed in "Proceedings" of local 

 clubs, papers now quite inaccessible to paleontological workers 

 in the best universities and government surveys. The organiza- 

 tions responsible for many of these papers no longer exist and 

 their papers are scattered and gone. Fortunately Guppy kept a 

 fairly complete copy of his various works, personally, and after 

 his death, four bound volumes of Transactions and Proceedings 

 of the Scientific Association of Trinidad, Journal of the Field 

 Naturalists' Glub and Proceedings of the Victoria Institute were 

 purchased for the library of the Trinidad Leaseholds Company 



