215 
soon led, by several coincident circumstances, to discover that the 
fossils to which the Professor refers are similar to those of Wiltshire, 
the nature of which I have just been endeavouring to ascertain. 
The Professor remarks that many had doubted the existence of ra- 
mified entrochi, and had supposed that their apparent branches were 
corals formed on them, in consequence of the coral-forming polypes 
having by accident become attached to their trunks. Of this opi- 
nion, he observes, he might perhaps himself have been, had not some 
of these specimens proved to him that these branches were not merely 
attached to the surface of the column, but had actually proceeded from 
its interior part. The crenulated articulation, one of the essential cha- 
racters of the entrochi, he observes, was discoverable in these ramifi- 
cations, which convinced him that the matter of which these branches 
were formed had not been applied accidentally to the surface of the 
column, and satisfied him that these were ramified entrochi, and parts 
of some zoophyte of the family of encrini. 
The first specimen, represented Tab. G. II. Fig. 1, of Knorr’s works, 
is evidently formed of a fragment of the tumid part of the lower ex- 
tremity of a large pear encrinus, with its proportionally thick invest- 
ing tunics. This investing part, as well as the part which it involves, 
bears very plainly the marks of the crenulated lines of articula- 
tion ; and as plainly, also, manifests its laminated structure. So evi- 
dent is this latter circumstance, that Mons. D’Annone, who compares 
its lamellae, so regularly disposed on one another, to the coats of an 
onion, is inclined to think that these concentric rings bear some ana- 
logy to those which mark the successive annual increase of trees. The 
circumstances here remarked are particularly obvious in Tab. G. II. 
Fig. 4, of the above work. 
In one of the specimens^ of Prof. D’Annone, the entrochus, after di- 
viding at its base into five branches, is spread along the surface of, and 
imbedded in, the calcareous stone, in such a form as to give at once the 
idea of its being the radical or foot-stalk of the encrinus. (Astropo- 
