PREFACE 
Robert John Lechmere Guppy was born August 15, 1836 and 
died August 5, 1916. Though a native of ^London he spent the 
greater share of his life in Trinidad. He was a great lover of 
Natural History. In spite of grave difiiculties he succeeded in 
preparing a large number of papers for publication. To list them 
completely would now doubtless be quite an impos.sible task 
since many appeared in ephemeral publications, newspapers, and 
are no longer extant. However the more serious paleontological 
articles, sometimes assuming the nature of monographs, were 
nearly all published in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological 
Society of Lo 7 idon or in the Geological Magazine. Between the 
purely popular and ephemeral, and the more serious, as classified 
above, a third cla.ss may be recognized, for the most part short 
articles, read before local natural history societies, clubs, etcetera, 
often semi-popular in nature but sometimes containing remarks 
on, or descriptions of new fossil species. Some of these too went 
abroad to the English Journals, although first appearing in the 
“Proceedings” of some local societj'. 
In preparing the following reprint, such articles of the third 
class, mentioned above, have been selected, as w'ere not repub- 
lished abroad, or, at least not republished in the same wording 
or in easily accessible volumes. In other words an attempt is 
here made to give to the scientific public an exact reprint of such 
of Guppy’s papers as were printed in “Proceedings” of local 
clubs, papers now quite inaccessible to paleontological workers 
in the best universities and government surveys. The organiza- 
tions responsible for many of these papers no longer exist and 
their papers are scattered and gone. Fortunateh’ Guppy kept a 
fairly complete copy of his various works, per.sonally, and after 
his death, four bound volumes of Transactions and Proceedings 
of the Scientific A.ssociation of Trinidad, Journal of the Field 
Naturalists’ Club and Proceedings of the Victoria Institute were 
purchased for the library of the Trinidad Leaseholds Companx- 
