COPROLITES. 189 
more common are they in the lias of the Estuary 
of the Severn, where they are similarly disposed 
in strata of many miles in extent, and mixed so 
abundantly with teeth and rolled fragments of 
the bones of reptiles and fishes, as to show that 
this region, having been the bottom of an ancient 
sea, was for a long period the receptacle of the 
bones and foecal remains of its inhabitants. 
The occurrence of Coprolites is not however 
peculiar to the places just mentioned, they are 
found in greater or less abundance throughout the 
lias of England ; they occur also in strata, of all 
Coprolites, especially the small ones, show no traces at all of 
contortion. 
" The sections of these foecal balls, {see PL 15, Figs. 4, and 6,) 
show their interior to be arranged in a folded plate, wrapped 
spirally round from the centre outwards, like the whorls of a 
turbinated shell ; their exterior also retains the corrugations and 
minute impressions, which, in their plastic state, they may have 
received from the intestines of the living animals. (See PL 15, 
Figs. 3, and 10 ^o 14.) Dispersed irregularly and abundantly 
throughout these petrified feeces, are the scales, and occasionally 
the teeth and bones of fishes, that seem to have passed undi- 
gested through the bodies of the Saurians ; just as the enamel of 
teeth and sometimes fragments of bone, are found undigested 
both in the recent and fossil album graecum of hyoenas. These 
scales are the hard bright scales of the Dapedium politum, and 
other fishes which abound in the lias, and which thus appear to 
have formed no small portion of the food of the Saurians. The 
bones are chiefly vertebree of fishes and of small Ichthyosauri ; 
the latter are less frequent than the bones of fishes, but still are 
sufficiently numerous, to show that these monsters of the ancient 
deep, like many of their successors in our modern oceans, may 
have devoured the small and weaker individuals of their own 
species." 
