some chemical experiments to boot. This age
produced the class of whom Mrs. Somerville is
the type. We have now got round again to the
frivolous epoch ; it will be the men's fault if it
lasts long, for women have consciences, and feel
that what their sons are to be depends mainly
on them ; besides, their minds are naturally more
active than those of the "lords of creation," and
if they now and then taboo everything intellectual
it is because they find such conduct pleases.
Geology does not seem a pursuit likely to
attract women, yet we have known several who
had picked up a very fair knowledge of its
outlines—some of them literally like Horace's
slave who had mastered the Stoic philosophy
while acting as pew-opener in Stertinius's lecture-
hall. There was a quaint old lady who used to
go her " midland circuit," calling on all parsons
and other supposed encouragers of science,
carrying about with her boxes of " specimens,"
and begging to be allowed to enlighten the
national school children at so much a head.
Then there is Miss Wetherall, at Amesbury,
quite worth a visit, her "museum" being
a collection of flints of the oddest shapes,
twisted like snakes, knotted like ropes,branching
like coral, and her talk being about Stonehenge
and the universal pre-diluvian serpent-
worship, of which she believes it a remnant, and
of noting the zealous affection with which she
points out tracings of Karnac, and snake temples
in India and America, drawn by her father, the
ex-cicerone of the neighbourhood.

But Mary Anning was something more than
a mere village celebrity, interesting to those who
like to study character, and are fond of seeing
good stubborn English perseverance make way
even where there is nothing in its favour. She
acquired, if not an English, certainly an European,
reputation. Professor Owen thought so highly of
her usefulness, that he moved the authorities of
the British Museum to grant her a pension of
forty pounds a year, which she enjoyed for some
little time before her early death.

Her father used to employ the church
holidays in picking up along the beach pretty
pebbles and shells, fossil and recent, and
"verterberries," and " John Dory's bones,"
and "ladies' fingers," and other "curies," as
they were called. Lyme and its neighbour,
Charmouth, were then on the old coach-road,
and the passengers mostly liked to take away a
specimen or two, which they got either from
Anning or from a Charmouth " fossiler," called
the Cury-man, or " Captain Cury," from his
trade in curiosities. In August, 1800, little
Mary Anning was taken to see some horse-riding
in the Rack field. A thunderstorm came on:
those in charge of her hurried her under a tree;
a flash of lightning struck the party, killing
two women on the spot, and making the child
insensible. A warm bath restored her to
consciousness, and, strangely enough, she who had
been a very dull girl before, now grew up lively
and intelligent. She soon got to accompany
her father in his rambles. " Fossiling," however
does not appear to have paid so well as
steady carpentry, for the family went down the
hill. The father died of consumption, and
Mary, at ten years of age, was left very badly
off. Just then a lady gave her half-a-crown for
a very choice ammonite. This encouraged her
to take to collecting as a regular means of life.
But she soon proved something more than a
mere " fossiler." Gradually that truth dawned
on her mind which our Laureate has sobeautifully expressed :

There rolls the deep where grew the tree;
   O earth, what changes thou hast seen!
There, where the long street roars, hath been
   The silence of the central sea.

In 1811, she saw some bones sticking out of a
cliff; and, hammer in hand, she traced the
position of the whole creature, and then hired men
to dig out for her the lias block in which it was
embedded. Thus was brought to light the
first Ichthyosaurus (fish-lizard), a monster some
thirty feet long, with jaws nearly a fathom in
length, and huge saucer eyes, some of which
have been found so perfect, that the petrified
lenses (the sclerotica, of which it had thirteen
coats) have been split off and used as
magnifiers. People then called it a crocodile. Mr.
Henley, the lord of the manor, bought it of the
enterprising young girl for twenty-three pounds.
It is now in the British Museum. Sir Everard
Home, writing in 1814, supported the crocodile
theory; by-and-by, when more perfect paddles
had been discovered, he said it must be a fish.
Dr. Buckland (father of our lively young salmon-
hatcher) pronounced its breast-bone to be that
of a lizard; Dr. Ure hit upon the happy name
ichthyosaurus; Conybeare, and De la Beche,
and others, had a turn at it; and at last all
their drawings, specimens, and a great many
fresh details which Miss Anning had since
brought to light, were sent over to Cuvier;
and, after a ten years' siege, the Protean
monster surrendered, and took the form under which
he is at present known. Then came the
Plesiosaurus, which was the occasion of a sharper,
though shorter, battle. Miss Anning's business,
of course, was not to take sides, but to furnish
the combatants with munitions of war—now a
paddle, then a jaw, then a stomach full of half
digested fish. She had in a high degree that
sort of intuition without which it is hopeless for
any one to think of becoming a good collector
of fossils.

Here, as in everything else, field and chamber
practice are widely different: you may be well up
in the latest theories, and able to argue perfectly
on the specimen when it is laid before you, and
yet you may totally lack that instinct which
will lead your brother-collector right to the
place where the "specimen" is to be found,
and will direct him in following up the track,
till from finding a fragment of a claw he
succeeds in ferreting out the whole skeleton. Our
heroine would have been able, for instance, out
of fifty " nodules," all looking to you much of a
muchness, to pick without hesitation the one
which, being cleft with a dexterous blow, should