In the year 1814 a few bones were found on the Dorsetshire coast between Charmouth and Lyme-Regis, and added to the collection of Bullock. They came from the Lias cliffs, undermined by the encroaching sea. Sir Everard's attention being attracted to them, he published the notices already referred to. The analogy of some of the bones to those of a crocodile, induced Mr. König, of the British Museum, to believe the animal to have been a saurian, or lizard; but the vertebræ, and also the position of certain openings in the skull, indicated some remote affinity with fishes, but this must not be pressed too far. The choice of a name, therefore, involved much difficulty; and at length he decided to call it the _Ichthyosaurus_, or fish-lizard. Mr. Johnson, of Bristol, who had collected for many years in that neighbourhood, found out some valuable particulars about these remains. The conclusions of Dean Buckland, then Professor of Geology at Oxford, led Sir Everard to abandon many of his former conclusions. The labours of the learned men of the day were greatly assisted by the exertions of Miss Anning, an enthusiastic collector of fossils. This lady, devoting herself to science, explored the frowning and precipitous cliffs in the neighbourhood of Lyme-Regis, when the furious spring-tide combined with the tempest to overthrow them, and rescued from destruction by the sea, sometimes at the peril of her life, the few specimens which originated all the facts and speculations of those persons whose names will ever be remembered with gratitude by geologists. [Illustration: Fig. 3.--_Ichthyosaurus intermedius._] Probably our readers are already more or less familiar with the drawings of the fossilised remains of Ichthyosauri to be seen in almost every text-book of geology. (Fig. 3 is from Owen's _British Fossil Reptiles_.) But we recommend all who take an interest in the world's lost creations to pay a visit to the great Natural History Museum, at South Kensington. The fossil reptile gallery contains a magnificent series of Ichthyosauri, about thirty in number. Of these a large number were obtained through the exertions of the late Mr. T. Hawkins, a Somersetshire gentleman, who was a most ardent collector of fossil reptiles, and who devoted himself with great enthusiasm and unsparing energy to the acquisition of a truly splendid collection of these most interesting relics of the past. Nearly sixty years ago he arranged for the purchase of his treasures by the authorities of the British Museum, and thus his collection became the property of the nation.