Wire Cutters Research Articles

LVI. Geological Notes and Queries:— Notes on the method adopted in collecting and mounting Entomostraca, etc., from the Carboniferous Strata of the West of Scotland

Having been requested to give a few general directions regarding the methods adopted by members of this Society, in searching for minute fossils, I gladly comply, by stating the various processes which have been so successfully employed in extracting many species of Foraminifera, Entomostraca, and minute shells, found in our limestones and shales. And while doing this, I may state that we do not claim any originality for our plan, which is that probably followed by Geologists in other localities, although we have never met with any description of their modus operandi. When we first began to pay any attention to the collecting of Entomostraca, etc., we selected specimens only of the limestones, ironstone, and hard shales containing them; and to get them extracted from the stone we broke it up into small fragments, and crushed these into a coarse powdery condition by means of a pair of wire cutters which do not go quite close in the head; by this means the great bulk of the specimens are freed from the matrix, and far fewer of them are broken in the process than would be imagined. The pounded material is then washed in order to free it from the dust, and afterwards dried and sifted through pieces of gauze cloth of different degrees of fineness. When the pounded material is thus assorted, it may then be searched for organisms by sprinkling a small quantity of the material upon a writing slate, with close fitting wooden edges, giving the slate This 250-word extract was created in the absence of an abstract