On the occurrence of Graphularia Wetherellii in Nodules from the London Clay and the Crag

Abstract

About twenty-six years since, on looking over some London Clay from a well at Colney Hatch Lane, near Muswell Hill, I discovered some curious fossils which at the time puzzled me very much. Having obtained, some years after, hotter specimens of these fossils from a well at Lower Heath, Hampstead, I submitted them to the inspection of Mr. James De Carl Sowerby; and he expressed an opinion that they were fragments of the horny axis of an extinct species of Pennatula , and gave me for comparison some examples of the recent Pennatula phosphorea of the British coast. In 1834 I drew up a paper for the Society, on some fossils from the south side of Hampstead Heath; and in one of the plates appended to the paper, some fragments of the Pennatula were figured*. In 1850 the first part of the beautiful monograph of British Fossil Corals by Milne-Edwards and Jules Haime was published by the Palæontographical Society. In this part the authors, after giving a full description of the fossil, state their reasons for separating it from Pennatula and forming a new genus, which they named Graphularia ; the Graphularia Wetherellii , found in the London Clay at many places†, and also in the Barton clay, is the only known type of the genus‡. I have for a long time considered that a great many of the calcareous nodules found in the Crag have been washed out of the London Clay at some former period, and that the greater number were