England has been visited by an earthquake. The newspapers have dilated upon it, and hundreds of persons have hastened to record their sensations. They have told us how they got out of bed and lit their candles, as if they had hoped to have seen the earthquake, like a ghost, wandering about the earth; but earthquakes do not linger, and the last British one was over before most people knew anything about it. Others fancied they heard a great roaring noise; others compared the shock to a great dog or animal shaking itself under the bedstead; others to the vibrating of a steam-engine. Some saw leaves fall, walls shake, and some felt “a warm breath of air” upon their cheeks. In short, some told the truth as far as they could, and some told what was not quite the truth. If the truth had been simply stated, and the press had helped to state it by publishing as many letters as their correspondents chose to send them, we should have no other comment to make than to have thanked it for its pains. But when leaders were printed in such terrible paroxysmal terms, thanking Heaven we were not all swallowed up, we can scarcely regard such sensation articles as little less than impious.

In the Plate accompanying this paper are figured three species of Terebratulæ, which the writer lately obtained from the Lower Greensand beds of the Isle of Wight. Two of them are interesting as being entirely new to these strata in Britain, whilst the third is a remarkable deformity of a rare species. In Fig. 1, 2, 4, a shell is drawn which appears to be identical with the Terebratula Moutoniana of D'Orbigny, a species not uncommon in France, associated with T. sella in the Upper Neocomian and Aptian beds of that author. It is somewhat oval in shape, depressed and elongated; surface entirely smooth. The perforate valve is rather more convex than the other, truncated by a foramen of moderate size; deltidium very short and small. Nine specimens of this species were obtained from the ferruginous Greensand beds, at Dunnose Point, near Shanklin. This shell, on external examination, is easily distinguished from T. sella, which it somewhat resembles, by the absence of any biplication on the frontal margin. Its internal structure proves it to belong to the section Waldheimia of King, which precludes all doubt as to its specific distinctions from T. sella. It is easily distinguished from Waldheimia Celtica, Morris, by its less elongated and gibbous outline.

The wonderful remains of the Archæopteryx, recently acquired for the British Museum, have naturally drawn attention to a muchneglected department of palæontology; and it will therefore not only be interesting, but useful also to the advance of science, to pass under review, at the present time, the state of our knowledge of the former existence of birds during past geological ages. The early authors, for the most part, speak not of fossil bird-remains properly so called, but in reality of mere incrustations by “petrifying springs,” of the fanciful tracery of dendritic markings, or the imagined resemblances of oddly-formed stones. Thus Albertus Magnus, in his book ‘De Mineralibus,’ printed in 1495, describes a fossil nest, with eggs, on the branch of a tree. This might or might not be a true fossil, but our recent discoveries of fossil birds and reptiles' eggs, and the knowledge we have now of delicate objects truly fossilized, such as insects, fruits, flowers, and feathers, renders it possible that some of the old records of such may have had a foundation of truth, and gives a probability that some at least may be brought within the capacity of belief as actual facts.

With this view, we shall quote from the old authors all the passages known to us, commenting on them as occasion may require; and in thus working up the bibliography of fossil ornithology and arranging the whole of our knowledge of the subject, as far as we have the power to do so, we shall be able to separate facts from fictions, and give a solid basis for further investigations in the future study of ornithological palæontology.