DAVIS : PEO. PHILLIPS. 
11 
almost any department of nature, but especially in zoology and 
geology." At York he became associated with Mr. W. Y. Harcourt, 
the first president of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, and they 
along with Brewster, Forbes, Johnson, Murchison and Daubeny, 
were the principal means of organizing the British Association for 
the Advancement of Science. Professor Phillips concludes his short 
autobiography with the following sentence. — " Educated in no 
college, I have professed geology in three Universities, and in each 
have found this branch of science firmly supported by scholars, 
philosophers and divines." 
We have considered, however briefly, the state of knowledge 
of the earth's crust anterior to the commencement of the present 
century. The exploded belief in the all-powerful energy and widely 
ranging results of the deluge gave place to an eamest endeavour 
by all scientists to collect and chronicle the fossil contents of the 
various strata. Cuvier did immense service in the tertiary beds of 
the Paris basin amongst the higher forms of animal life, and was 
worthily followed by his pupil Louis Agassiz, whose knowledge of 
recent and fossil fishes led him to perceive a succession in the forms 
deposited in the earliest rocks and ranging up to the present time, 
which bears some correspondence to the developmental stages of 
modern fishes. Professor Agassiz in this country found a fellow- 
worker amongst the fossil fishes, in Sir Philip Egerton, whose 
ichthyological contributions to scientific literature have been both 
important and extensive. Sowerby, Owen, Morris, Forbes and 
many others were collecting and describing fossils from the British 
rocks. John Phillips was not idle, in addition to his many other 
published works about ^this period, and all his lecturing and 
arranging museums, he published (1829 — 1836) his " Illustrations 
of the Geology of Yorkshire," in two quarto volumes, which beside 
the stratigraphical descriptions of the northern and eastern 
divisions of the county, contained descriptions and figures of hun- 
dreds of species of fossils, ranging over the whole series of the 
animal kingdom comprised in the strata between the silurian rocks 
