1(34 
Ordinary Meeting, November 15th, 1859. 
Mr. J. C. Dyer, Vice-President, in the Chair. 
Mr. John Atkinson made a communication respecting a 
curiously-shaped fossil, found about a month ago in the 
Upper New Red Sandstone in a quarry near Runcorn. This 
fossil had been described in the Athencuum of the 29th of 
October last by Mr. Henry Wilson, Surgeon, Runcorn, who 
pointed out its striking resemblance to the mullion and tracery 
of part of an ancient gothic window, not merely in size and 
general outline, but in the moulding upon it, as if of tooling 
by the hand of some primitive mason. On the 5th instant 
the Athenceum contained two letters on the same subject, the 
first from Mr. Jukes, Local Director of the Geological Survey 
of Ireland, and the second from Mr. Archer, of Liverpool. 
Neither of the writers had seen the fossil. From the descrip- 
tion given of it, Mr. Jukes expressed his belief that the 
“quadrilateral mullion and tracery” described by Mr. Wilson 
was nothing more than an unusually large and regular ex- 
ample of sandstone veins formed in the cracks of a bed of 
clay intervening between two strata of sandstone. Mr. 
Archer thought it was a dichotomous branch of the great 
fucoid plant which had been discovered at Stourton Hill 
Quarry nearly twenty years ago. Opinions being thus 
divided, Mr. Atkinson stated that he had visited the Runcorn 
Hill Quarry and examined the fossil itself; and that he had 
found it to be, as Mr. Jukes had suggested, a mass of fine- 
grained sandstone veins. 4'hese had been deposited in thin 
horizontal laminse and moulded in a system of cracks formed 
by desiccation and subsequent modification — probably by the 
action of water — in the bed of marl (here eight inches thick) 
so celebrated as being that on which the last of the Laby- 
rinthodon order of animals have left**^their footprints in such 
vast abundance at Stourton, Runcorn, Lymm, and various 
Proceedings— Lit. & Phil. Society— No 4.— Session, 18')9-6i'). 
