Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 72.djvu/567

Rh later Sir J. W. Dawson and Sir Charles Lyell in breaking apart one of the stumps of the Large Sigillariæ came across some interesting vertebrate remains. When the announcement of this discovery was given to the Geological Society of London, the president or secretary remembered a skull which Dawson had sent in three years previously and which had lain in the collection of the society all of this time. Dawson had been delayed one day at Albion, Nova Scotia, and in order to while away the time between trains looked over a pile of rubbish from a coal mine near by. In so doing he split open a large slab of shale in which he found a nearly perfect skull of some unknown animal which he thought might be a fish. This he sent to the Geological Society with other specimens, and it was described in 1853 by Sir Richard Owen as Raphetes planiceps, and its relationships were shown to be with the Amphibia. There have been but few remains discovered since at this locality, although it was frequently examined by Dawson.

For many years after 1853, Dawson continued his researches into the Amphibia of the Joggins section in Nova Scotia, and he has left us a great amount of knowledge which he collected into his "Acadian Geology" and into his "Air-Breathers of the Coal Period." The forms described by Dawson differed in an essential respect from those discovered in the United States. The animals whose remains occur in the hollow sigillarian stumps in the Joggins deposits, seem to have all