1825-1830.] 
MISS ANNING. 
ii5 
fragmentary condition, and the greatest judgment and 
care were required in arranging the disconnected parts. 1 
Miss Anning kept a little curiosity shop at Lyme, which 
is admirably described in the King of Saxony’s account 
of his journey through England and Scotland in 1844 :— 
“We had alighted from the carriage, and were proceeding 
along on foot, when we fell in with a shop in which the 
most remarkable petrifactions and fossil remains—the 
head of an ichthyosaurus, beautiful ammonites, etc.—were 
exhibited in the window. We entered, and found a little 
shop and adjoining chamber completely filled with fossil 
productions of the coast. It is a piece of great good 
fortune for the collectors when the heavy winter rains 
loosen and bring down large masses of the projecting 
coast. When such a fall takes place, the most splendid 
and rarest fossils are brought to light, and made accessible 
almost without labour on their part. In the course of the 
past winter there had been no very favourable slips ; the 
stock of fossils on hand was therefore smaller than usual : 
still I found in the shop a large slab of blackish clay, in 
which a perfect ichthyosaurus of at least six feet was 
embedded. This specimen would have been a great 
acquisition for many of the cabinets of Natural History 
on the Continent, and I consider the price demanded_ 
£15 sterling—as very moderate. I was anxious at all 
events to write down the address, and the woman who 
kept the shop, for it was a woman who had devoted herself 
to this scientific pursuit, with a firm hand wrote her name 
‘Mary Anning’ in my pocket-book, and added, as she 
returned the book into my hands, ‘ I am well known 
throughout the whole of Europe. ’ ” 
1 It took Miss Anning ten years to extract the entire skeleton of the 
plesiosaurus from its watery grave in the lias rocks, only accessible 
at low water. Lately a man has spent two years of patient labour in 
extracting from its rocky matrix the fossil skeleton of a turtle from 
the Cape, which is now placed in the British Museum of Natural 
History. 
