72 
PROCEEDINGS 1839 — 1840. 
substance, about four inches in tliickness ; and this is identical with 
the beds of coal, several feet in tliickness, which are worked at 
Halifax, and supply the extensive manufacturing districts of Bradford 
and Halifax with the greater part of their fuel. But how do we know 
the thin bed of black earth at Moortown to be the same bed as the 
coal at Halifax ? Their appearance, or in other words, their physical 
characters do not enable us thus to decide. It is from their being 
accompanied by a particular fossil, the Pecten papyraceus, which is 
now known to be characteristic of this bed. The author goes on to 
explain that this characteristic fossil has been traced in the roof of 
the coal seam from Moortown, Kirkstall, Idle, Bradford, and Halifax. 
A point of considerable interest, as a matter of history, is embodied 
in the foregoing observation, that fifty years ago the manufacturing 
towns of Bradford and Halifax obtained their principal supply of coal 
from the Halifax beds; it indicates very forcibly the immense increase 
that has taken place during that period in the industries of those 
towns. Mr. Teale enumerated four genera of ganoid, and seven 
genera of placoid fishes. The following account of the identification 
of the genus Megalichthys is interesting. " The earliest known 
specimens of this fossil are some in the Leeds Museum, of which a 
description was sent upwards of fifteen years ago, by the late Edward 
S. George, to the Geological Society of London, at which time they 
were regarded as the remains of a Saurian reptile. In 1833, at the 
Limestone quarries at Burdiehouse, near Edinburgh, were discovered, 
in great abundance, teeth, scales and bones of large size. These 
formed the subject of several papers to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 
in the earlier of which they were described as the remains of reptiles. 
In 1834, at the Meeting of the British Association at Edinburgh, 
these fossils, which by this time had excited great interest amongst 
naturalists, were shown to M. Agassiz. This gentleman immediately 
doubted their reptilian character, and advanced the opinion that they 
belonged to fishes, to that family of the ganoid order, which he had 
denominated Sauroid, from their numerous affinities to Saurian 
reptiles, and which have as their living type or representative, the 
Lepidosteus. But of the truth or fallacy of this opinion, no positive 
evidence could be adduced, for the scales and the teeth had never yet 
