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counties. By virtue of tins authority they held sessions of oyer-and- 
terminer and gaol-delivery alternately at York, Newcastle and 
Pontefract, heard and decided causes between party and party, and 
pronounced judgment in criminal cases without the intervention of a 
jury. Even at the ordinary assizes some of the members were 
present and took part in the proceedings. The Duke returned to 
the South in 1527, but the Council continued to exercise the same 
powers as before. When the insurrection called the Pilgrimage of 
Grace broke out, in 1536, it was still in existence and exercising its 
powers; but in 1537 the king converted it into a standing court, 
which bore the title of the Great Council of the North, and by its 
arbitrary and almost irresponsible powers, exercised an iron rule for 
more than a century over that part of England which lies between 
the Trent and the Tweed. Henry YIII., when he remodelled the 
Council and gave it a permanent character, might wish to have the 
credit of being its author, but it really originated from the master 
mind of Wolsey. 
May 9. — Mr. Charlesworth, Keeper of the Museum, read a 
paper respecting the Ichthyosaurus Platyodon from the alum strata 
at Kettleness, lately presented to the Museum by the Rev. D. R. 
Roundell. The Whitby district has long been known for its Saurian 
remains, and within the last ten or fifteen years has produced no less 
than five perfect, or nearly perfect. Plesiosauri; but of the allied 
genus, the Ichthyosaurus, no large or remarkably perfect specimen 
has been found there until now. The largest previously known, 
tolerably complete Ichthyosaurus is the I. platyodon from Lyme 
Regis in the British Museum. Its absolute length is 18 feet; its 
computed length, when perfect, 20 feet. The Whitby specimen is 
23 feet long, and its computed length 28 feet. It therefore surpasses 
in total length any skeleton, of corresponding completeness, yet 
discovered. From the structure of the paddles, form of the teeth, 
vertebrae, &c., Mr. Charlesworth considered it to agree more nearly 
with I. platyodon than any other described species; but as a large 
proportion of the saurians and other fossils found in the Yorkshire 
Lias are distinct from those found in the South of England, its cha¬ 
racter should be very rigorously investigated, before it is confidently 
referred to this or any other published species. 
