A CATALOGUE 
OF THE PLIOCENE ECHINOIDEA 
IjY tee reed collection, 
IN THE 
MUSEUM OF THE YOKKSHIRE PHILOSOPHICAL 
SOCIETY. 
With the exception of the Lower Cainozoic deposits of the 
London and Hampshire Basins, no English deposits were more 
diligently explored early in the centnry than the Crags of 
Suffolk and Essex. The Eocene and Oligocene deposits at first 
offered greater attractions to geologists owing to the superior 
beauty and the tropical affinities of their fossils. Hence in 
such early catalogues as that in Conybeare and Phillips’ 
“Outlines of the Geology of England and Wales” 
the Crag lists were very brief in comparison with those of the 
older deposits. But as the introduction of railways rendered 
the Eastern coast more accessible, and as the value of the 
phosphate nodules became better appreciated, the attention of 
geologists was diverted to the rich Crag fauna and during the 
next thirty years the greatest collections from the beds 
were made. Plence when in 1852, Professor E. lYrhes 
publislmd his “ Monograph of the British Tertiary Echinoder- 
mata,” he had access to most of the best of the material now 
preserved in our principal Museums. Since then, other 
workers have been busy in the deposits and the Wallace and 
Canham Collections at Ipswich, the Montague Smith Collection 
at Cambrido’e, and others have added considerablv to our 
knowledge of the Crag fauna. But of these later collections, 
that made by William Peed, Esq., M.P.C.S., and presented 
by him to the Museum of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, 
is probably the most valuable and it contains most of the 
choicest finds made in the Crags during the past five and twenty 
years. 
