THE GEOLOGIST 



NOVEMBER, 1860. 



GEOLOGICAL L 0 C ALIT I E S.— No. L 

 rOLKESTONE. 

 By S. J. Mackie, F.G.S., F.S.A, 



(Continued from ^ age 35 7. J 



Ro SINUS, Walch, Lemery, and otliers writing after him followed not 

 in tlie new patli opened out to them, but reiterated former absurdities. 



Bruckmann thinks tliem a kind of pholas, or boring shell ; Bour- 

 quet holds to the old notion of their being teeth of whales ; Klein 

 even in 1731 regards them as worm-tubes, although three years later 

 he comes round to the opinion that they were nearly allied to the 

 Argonautes, Spirulee, and chambered shells. Dufay, one of the 

 numerous writers who followed, states that burnt belemnites have 

 the property of being luminous after having been calcined upwards 

 of five years. We have not tried the experiment, and cannot, there- 

 fore, speak to the accuracy of the assertion. 



Capeller, in 1740, proposes to regard the Belemnite as a species 

 of Holothuria, the soft parts of which had become petrified ; the 

 opening, in his opinion, being the mouth of the creature for seizing 

 its prey, and the alveolus a shell half swallowed. 



Bromell, Ritter (1741), Da Costa (1747), lead up to Linnaeus, who 

 in his " Systema Natura" has placed them somewhere near the mark. 

 Of the authors which now follow. Baker (1748) regarded them as 

 marine animals allied to Orthoceras ; Stob^us (1752), as a species of 



VOL. III. 3 D 



