species of this order, we notice Golden Eyes, Scaup, Tufted, Long-tailed, the richly marked Harlequin, and other beautiful species. Yet another case of this numerous family, containing fine examples of Sheld, Eider, Scoters, Goosanders, and other showy species. The Great Northern Diver is in the centre of a beautiful group of the Divers, which comprise the Grebes, Black and Red-throated. This case attracted great notice, so life-like were the specimens, nearly all in breeding plumage, and set up with consummate skill. "How much like it is to the Razorbill next to it," is the remark of a member, as we look upon that extinct bird which at one time was wantonly destroyed by sailors, who little thought the time would come when a specimen would sell for nearly its weight in gold. This is the Great Auk (Alca impennis). Mr. Rocke bought this specimen in Holland. According to Professor Newton, the total number of skins of this species known to be in existence is about 77. This great rarity is surrounded by Gannets, Cormorants, Puffins, Guillemots, and similar species. It is needless to say this case is left with great reluctance. We now complete our inspection of the birds by just glancing at the Gulls, Terns, and Petrels, and regret is expressed on all sides that the length of the programme did not allow time to inspect the treasures which were left with only a passing glance. This beautiful and elegant family always wins admiration whether looking at them set up by the taxidermist, or when they relieve the dull monotony of the sea by their elegant flight and graceful motions.

Last to be seen were the fine collection of eggs. A few minutes only could be allotted to them. Of course the great object of interest was a specimen of the egg of the Great Auk, which was bought at the sale of the late Mr. John Gould's collection. It is richly marked, contrasting much with the engraving in "Morris's Eggs of British Birds." There are about seventy known at the present time, the greater number in the British Isles. A gentleman in Scarborough has 20 in his possession. This, with a remarkable series of the eggs of the Common Guillemot, containing the most extraordinary varieties, deep green, white, wood brown, with more or less darker markings, completed the inspection.

Such is the record of this magnificent private collection of British Birds as faithfully as can be now given from memory and the absence of notes, due to the limited time at disposal during a far too brief and hurried visit.

Leaving Leintwardine Church the majority of the party walked to the Church Hill Quarry, distant about half a mile, where many forms of Star fish, Ceratiocaris, Pteraspis, etc., have been discovered in the Lower Ludlow Formation. Here the Rev. J. D. La Touche gave the following notes:

The Asteroidea, or Star fishes, of which a great variety were found at Church Hill some years ago, though occurring very locally in the Palæozoic strata have a very wide range in point of time. The earliest known specimen in Great Britain is that of Palasterina Ramseyensis obtained in the Tremadoc, or Upper Cambrian beds of Ramsey Island, off the S. W. coast of Wales, near St. David's. The genus Protaster has been observed in the Ordovician or Lower Silurian strata, and in the Upper Silurian at Kendal four species have been noted. At

Church Hill here, a specimen of Protaster Miltoni, nearly a foot wide from tip to tip of the rays, has been discovered. The persistency of these organisms from the remote period at which these rocks were deposited, down to the present day is remarkable; for though there are certain structural differences, which make it probable that the ancient starfishes belong to genera and even families distinct from any living forms, their general appearance is wonderfully like those with which we are familar on our shores, some of them closely resembling the modern Pteraster and Palasterina. Mr. Salter remarks that the chief characteristics which distinguish the palæozoic from the modern forms are the shallowness of the ambulacra or furrows running along the underside of the arms, and the square plate-like form of the ambulacral scales; though in some specimens even these differences are not persistent, and he writes with considerable reserve in relation to the points of difference between them and the modern type. To the hardness of the calcareous covering with which these creatures, like their present descendants, were protected, we, of course, owe the excellent state of preservation in which, for the most part, they are found. The great slabs crowded with beautiful specimens of Palæocoma Marstoni displayed in the cases of the Ludlow Museum must excite the admiration of all who examine them. No less than ten species are spoken of by Murchison as having been found on this spot, and I believe many more might be added since Salter wrote on the subject in 1857. Mr. Alfred Marston, e.g., possesses, amongst others, a quite unique specimen, in which the five original rays are, at a short distance from the centre, each subdivided into five subsidiary rays, so that the total number would he 25. This possibly may be a monstrosity, but the great variety of these beautiful forms at this early period almost suggests the thought that in the dim remote past, nature was more variable and plastic than now. The Asteroidea are low in the scale of the animal kingdom. They are classified above the Calenterata, which include the corals, and below the Annulosa, including the worms and trilobites. They are here associated with many other forms of great interest, with a Pterygotus of great size, Ceratiocaris of several species, a Limalus, of which but one specimen, I believe, has been found by Mr. Marston, with Encrinites, Bryozoa, and the ordinary Graptolites of the Lower Ludlow Rock, though one rare species of these last may be collected in the lane that leads to Trippleton. But one of the most interesting discoveries at this spot has been that of the fragment of a Pteraspis, the earliest known fossil fish, a fact which caused Sir R. Murchison, in the last edition of his "Siluria," to modify his former contention that the fishes of the bone bed, which occurs at the top of the Upper Ludlow formation, were the oldest Icthyolites. He says, indeed, that the concession is a slight one, since the position of the Pteraspis is still scarcely beneath the centre of the Ludlow Formation as a whole. Murchison belonged to that school of geologists who believed in the distinct creation without descent from previous ancestors, of successive types of animal life on the globe, and he clings rather pertinaciously to his dictum that the first fishes only made their appearance at the close of the Silurian epoch. The champions of that hypothesis are in the somewhat embarrassing predicament of having from time to time to make concessions like that to which I have just

referred. Nor could Murchison have stopped where he did, since within the last few months, the Hon. W. Drummond has been so fortunate as to find another specimen of a form closely allied to Pteraspis, viz., a Scaphaspis, in Stoke quarry nearly at the base of the Lower Ludlow. The following extract from Darwin's famous book, "The Origin of Species," in which he adduces a very striking instance to show how extremely "liable we are to error in supposing that whole groups of species have suddenly been produced," bears strongly on this point. "In a memoir on fossil sessile cirripedes, I have stated that, from the number of existing and Tertiary species; from the extraordinary number of individuals of many species all over the world, from the Arctic Regions to the Equator, inhabiting various zones of depth from the upper tidal limits to 50 fathoms; from the perfect manner in which specimens are preserved in the oldest Tertiary beds; from the ease with which even a fragment of a valve can be recognised; from all these circumstances, I inferred that had sessile cirripedes existed during the Secondary period, they would certainly have been preserved and discovered; and as not one species had then been discovered in beds of this age, concluded that this great group had been suddenly developed at the commencement of the Tertiary series. This was a sore trouble to me, adding, as I thought, one more instance to the abrupt appearance of a great group of species. But my work had hardly been published when a skilful paleontologist, M. Bosquet, sent me a drawing of a perfect specimen, of an unmistakable sessile cirripede, which he had himself extracted from the chalk of Belgium. And, as if to make the case as striking as possible, this sessile cirripede was a Chthamalus, a very common, large, and ubiquitous genus, of which not one specimen has at yet been found even in any Tertiary stratum. Hence we now positively know that sessile cirripedes existed during the Secondary period; and these cirripedes might have been the progenitors of our many Tertiary and existing species." (Darwin).—Origin of Species, p. 304.

The carriages were then rejoined and the drive resumed to Onibury, a halt being made at Mocktree to inspect a striking exposure of the Aymestrey and Lower and Upper Ludlow Rocks; here the geologists were in their element, and the constant tap tap of the hammers gave evidence of their zeal. Some distance further the vehicles were again left and the party walked to the Forge Bridge, a beautiful spot, near which a section of the Ludlow Bone Bed was inspected. The drive was then continued to Onibury, and through Stokesay to Craven Arms, where dinner was provided at the hotel, and enjoyed with a zest such a field day gives. After dinner, the learned President of the Caradoc Field Club read the following paper :

The term Passage or Transition Beds is applied to those strata which indicate, by the fossil remains entombed in them, a more rapid change than ordinary in the physical condition of the earth's surface at the time of their formation. It may easily be supposed that when vast tracts of lands were either being elevated above or sinking beneath the surface of the ocean, or large areas were being converted from salt to fresh water, the altered physical conditions must have produced a corresponding effect on the organic life of the period, and conversely where we find a striking change in the fauna of the various successive

strata, older types being rapidly replaced by new, it is reasonable to conclude that the change is chiefly due to those secular upheavals or depressions of the earth's surface, of which we have numerous examples in various parts of the world in the present day. The existence, then, of these Passage Beds between strata like those of the Silurian system which tell us of geologic epochs of long continuance, during which but little change took place in the prevalent fauna, and others in which much higher types occur, is a fact of much interest in helping us to ascertain to some extent the configuration of the land in those distant times, and in throwing light on the succession of life on the globe. The Passage Beds which we have here especially under consideration are those which occur at the summit of the Silurian series and below the base of the Old Red, and we have every reason to suppose that they represent an epoch when great areas of what had previously been salt water were becoming vast land-locked lagoons, or freshwater lakes. A similar phenomenon must have occurred in the Trias period, when the salt beds of Cheshire were formed in the depressions filled with inland salt lakes resembling the Caspian Sea. It is true that the barrier no longer remains which would have been required to cut off these inland lakes from the ocean. It has been swept away in the course of time by denudation. But the gradual change both in the lithological character of the earlier rocks and in their fossil contents are almost as convincing proofs of its having once existed as if we could now behold it. Every one who has hammered at the Silurian rocks must be struck by the gradual change from the mud-stone nature of the Wenlock beneath to the more shaly condition of the Lower Ludlow above, and so on to the distinctly sandy character of the Upper Ludlow. As for the strata of limestone, the Aymestrey and Wenlock, that occur in these rocks, I have long maintained that they are due to segregation and not to any distinct alteration in sedimentary deposit. Now what does this gradual change from a more argillaceous to a more arenaceous rock denote, but that a slow upheaval of the earth's crust was going on during all that long time, and that it culminated in the separation of the area covered by the Old Red Sandstone from the rest of the land? A change which we may realise to our minds if we suppose the bed of the Atlantic, over which there is being constantly deposited successive layers of impalpable ooze, which in time would harden into shale-suppose, I say, the whole of this up-raised, we should then have above the shales a series of coarser deposits washed down from the contiguous land, the material for future sandstones, and, perhaps, ultimately pebbly beaches, the material for future conglomerates. In order to keep clearly before our minds the succession of beds which this day's excursion brings under our notice, I may here briefly enumerate their sequence. At the very summit of the Upper Ludlow rock we find what is called the Bone Bed-a very singular deposit chiefly composed of the remains of fish defences, accompanied by Beyrichia, a minute bivalve crustacean, and fragments of Pteraspis and Lingula. Professor Lapworth has explained the conditions under which this remarkable deposit was formed by supposing that it took place in still water, into which for long ages no sediment was carried, and that it is composed of the remains of the innumerable generations of fishes that from time to time inhabited its tranquil depths. It is in this district, at

least, succeeded by another thin layer in which the prevalent fossil is Platyschisma Helicites, a gasteropod shell, and Lamellibranchs. Then succeeds a stratum called the Downton Sandstone, which in several places reaches a thickness of 50 or 60 feet, and this is followed by the Passage Beds proper, which pass conformably into the Old Red Sandstone above them. Thus from the Bone Bed to the Old Red, the intervening strata may be considered as transitional. The district throughout which these beds have been detected is very extensive. We had an opportunity recently of examining a magnificent exposure of them at the mouth of the Ledbury Tunnel, though no trace of the Bone Bed has, as far as I am aware, been detected in that locality. The thickness of the Passage Beds there, according to Mr. Piper's careful measurements, is very great. It would seem that towards the west the beds diminish in thickness, though their relative position in the series remains the same. Measurements made at the lane from Onibury leading to Norton are as follows:-Commencing at the top, and in succession, we have grey shale, 14ft.; red shale, 7 inches; grey, 3ft.; red, 2ft.; grey rubbly shale, 28ft. with Eurypterus, Beyrichia, Lingula cornea; hard sandstone, 1ft.; thin layers of red and grey, 5ft.; red, 5ft.; yellow shale (possibly summit of the Downton Sandstone), 15ft. Unfortunately the whole section, which a few years ago was very well marked and instructive, has been much obscured by overgrowth and the crumbling of the rock, due to exposure. Travelling still further west we find the same beds, recently discovered by Mr. Garnett-Botfield, at the Reilth, near Bishop's Castle, but of still reduced dimensions. Here the enormous quantities of the gasteropod Platyschisma with which they are accompanied is truly remarkable. Far apart from here, at the eastern limit of the county near Bridgnorth some years ago Mr. Randall was so fortunate as to discover a fine exposure of the very same series in Darley Dingle and Linley Brook, a full description of which is given Vol. xix., part 3, Quart. Jour. Geol. Soc. Here too the beds, though small in dimensions, are perfectly distinct and present the same succession both of lithological character and of organic life as elsewhere. Lastly, the fossils which distinguish this series tell us clearly enough of a mighty change in the physical condition of their environment. The discovery of Pteraspis in the Lower Ludlow, to which I have already referred, shows that during the Silurian epoch fishes had already made their appearance. The occurrence of specimens is, indeed, extremely rare; though this fact, as Darwin and Lyell have long since shown, is no proof that in certain favourable localities the family may not have been abundant during the epoch. The probability is that the earlier rocks are deep sea deposits, whereas the Pteraspis and such creatures frequented shallower waters, and it would be a very exceptional circumstance for an individual to find himself drifted out so far from his usual habitat. Professor Prestwich observes that these early fishes, of which the chief characteristic is the stout shield or carapace with which the head is covered, while the rest of the body is without any protection, probably, like a fish that now frequents the Delta of the Nile, lived with the hinder parts buried in the mud and sand while the strong armour that shielded their heads gave them the power of watching for and seizing their prey in safety. In the Downton Sandstone moreover are found in abundance the first