Mar. 81, 1910. The Queensland Naturalist. 131 
and less dangerous. I doubt whether Palseolithic man 
could have filled a Pleistocene Natural History museum 
with mammals in the skin more completely than \ictorian 
man has filled the cases at Kensington with skeletons. 
18. _] go further. I doubt whether we do not know 
some of the old faunas quite as well as the modern ones. 
Take the mollusca once more in illustration. What a 
minute area the naturalists’ dredges have trailed over, 
and only for a few hours at a time ! Tf they gathered in 
every living form they encountered they would but 
capture the individuals that happened to be living on 
that particular spot at that particular moment. Go over 
the same ground a month, a year after ; can you not add 
to your list I And after all. the dredge can only bring 
up the surface forms ; it does not dig. it only sweeps. 
Would not Mr. Tryon or Mr. Shirley gloat if he had the 
chance of examining a section a hundred feet thick of the 
sea bottom off our Barrier Reef ? 
19. — Now this is what the geologist can do. He has 
not to grope blindly for his specimens with a bag at the end 
of a string. The sea-bottom has come ashore for him,, 
got comfortably dried, and often sliced into convenient 
sections hundreds of feet thick and hundreds of miles 
long. 
20. — Permit me to use an English illustration, which 
has many pleasant memories for me. The Pliocene beds 
(Crags) around Norwich are splendidly exposed in numbers 
of huge pits in constant work so as continually to expose 
fresh material, and my old friend Searles W’ood, spent a 
life-time and a fortune in these happy hunting grounds. 
In mollusca alone he had by 
described : — 
1887 
found, 
figured and 
Polyzoa 
32 
genera 
139 
species 
Brachio])oda 
7 
genera 
9 
species 
Pelecypoda Monomyaria 
7 
genera 
34 
species 
Dimyaria . . 
72 
genera 
224 
speciesr 
Theropoda 
1 
genera 
1 
species 
Gasteropoda 
83 
genera 
416 
species 
Cephalopoda 
0 
genera 
0 
species 
Total 
202 
genera 
823 
species 
Can any reasonable being imagine that if Searles W^ood 
had been a contemporary of Pithecanthropus, and collected 
shells fi'om a Tertiary dug-out, he would have made a 
better haul I Did Gwyn Jeffreys get a better idea of the 
shells of the North Sea knocking about the Dogger Bank 
in a Norfolk ketch during the time his friend. Searles Wood, 
sat at ease in his study sifting crag sand by the cartload ? 
When to this rich collection we add the almost, sometimes 
cpute as rich, collections from Belgium, France, Switzer- 
