1825-1830.] VISIT TO LYME. 113 
and convicted in the Town Hall. The bodies of the 
criminals in those days were handed over for anatomical 
purposes to the Professor of Medicine. This big culprit, 
finding the case was going against him through the evidence 
of a witness, stretched out his long arm over the witness 
box, and with one mighty blow felled the unfortunate 
man to the ground and killed him on the spot, so that 
one murder begat another. 
On another occasion, the Judge had passed sentence of 
imprisonment upon a woman. As she was leaving the 
dock, she took off one of her shoes (boots were not worn 
in those days), and threw it with such good aim and with 
so good a will at the Judge, that he was not a little 
discomfited—in fact, his Lordship was nearly sent reeling 
from the Bench, 
After the death of the little boy Adam, the family went 
by coach for change of air to Lyme. The shore in this 
neighbourhood is a vast charnel-house of fossil bones of 
the monsters that must have at one time lived, preyed on 
one another, and ultimately died, at or near this very 
spot On the lias beds of this happy hunting ground 
of geologists, Dr. Buckland took the children fossilising, 
and made them acquainted with the local celebrity Mary 
Anning, who, from the early age of ten, gained her 
livelihood and supported a widowed mother by collecting 
specimens on the beach. It was in 1811 that she made 
her first great discovery of the ichthyosaurus, which, with 
the vertebras of a fish, partook partly of the character of 
the crocodile, but differed materially from any existing 
reptile of the lizard kind. At Lyme also lived Sir Henry 
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