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Demonstration at the British Museum (natural history), South Kensington
65 DEMONSTRATION AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM (NATURAL HISTORY), SOUTH KENSINGTON. Saturday, 9th March, 1935.
" MARY ANNING, 'FOSSILIST.''' Report by W. D. LANG, Sc.D., F.R.S., F.G.S. T E E N Members assembled in the Hall, and were NI NEtaken to the Board Room, which, by the courtesy of the Director, had been lent for the occasion. There Dr. Dighton Thomas, on behalf of Dr. Lang, who was absent through illness, gave a lantern lecture on Mary Arming," and afterwards demonstrated to the members in the galleries of the Department of Geology various specimens with which Mary AIming had been associated. From very early times the fossils of the West Dorset coast were collected and sold as "curiosities" to the passengers of coaches going through Charmouth on their way between Dorchester and Exeter; and, after I758, fossils found a market in Lyme itself, when visitors began to frequent that town after it had been connected with Charmouth by a turnpike road. Richard Anning, a carpenter of Lyme, was one of those who supplemented his earnings by collecting and selling fossils to summer visitors; and Mary, his eldest child, would accompany him on the beach when he went on these excursions. Indeed, in later life, Mary claimed that she learned what she knew of fossils from her father; but this information must have been meagre compared with the knowledge which she subsequently acquired by her own experience. According to Roberts, Lyme's first historian, Richard Arming's wife ridiculed her husband's pursuit of fossils, and when he spent a holiday in this way, unless it was Good Friday or a Saint's Day (when, being a Dissenter, he collected fossils instead of going to church), she used to be very angry with him. Mary was born in I799. When she was yet an infant, her nurse and some companions were killed by lightning as they stood beneath a tree for shelter from the rain. Mary, although struck insensible, was revived. In I8IO Richard died of consumption; and one day in the same year Mary, carrying home an ammonite which she had found on the beach, met a lady visitor to Lyme, who offered her half-a-crown for the specimen. This incident, says Roberts, determined her to sell fossils for her living; and thus, at ten years old, she began a career that was soon to make her famous to her contemporaries as "the most eminent female fossilist." Within a year she had made a great discovery-the first associated I chiliyosaurus skeleton I A fuller account of .l\Iary Anning, with illustrations, has appeared in the .\. r-atural History
Magazine, 1935, vol, v., pp. 64-81.
Pxoc, GEOL. Assoc., VOL. XLVII., PARI
I,
1936.
5
66
W. D. LANG,
known to science; and we read of this child of eleven hiring men to disengage it from the stratum in which it lay, and selling it to the Lord of the Manor for £23. By this means she began to be known to scientists outside Lyme who were interested in the Lias, and in particular to William Buckland. She was already known to De la Beche, who then lived at Lyme, whence he had moved while still a boy from Charmouth. For more than a decade we hear little about Mary Arming, but during this time she was assiduously collecting fossils, and supplying the pioneer geologists with material. In 1824, however, she made her second great find in a nearly complete skeleton of Plesiosaurus, a genus which De la Beche and Conybeare had already named as new from some fragmentary material collected in the Bristol neighbourhood and possibly also from Lyme; but nothing like a complete skeleton was known, and Mary Arming's specimen caused a sensation in the geological world. It was bought by the Duke of Buckingham at a price variously quoted as £IOO, £150, and £200. The Duke lent it to Buckland for scientific examination; but Buckland allowed Conybeare to describe it, and there is still extant a letter, written by Conybeare to De la Beche, describing his delight at the discovery and at a sketch which Mary Anning had made of the creature; how he threw down the sermon he was writing, leaving it for his sister-in-law to copy out (and did she complete it ?) for the following Sunday, and lectured on the find to the Philosophical Club which he had founded among his country parishioners. This famous specimen may be seen in the fossil reptile gallery at the British Museum (Natural History). Mary Anning subsequently found other Plesiosaur skeletons, of which the most important was a new species described by Buckland as Plesiosaurus macrocephalus. The simple, friendly, and respectful letter in which she announced this find to Buckland is quite at variance with the statement of an amateur geologist who went along the shore with Mary Anning in 1824, collecting Hybodus spines-one Thomas Allan, who wrote in his journal that Miss Anning held Buckland's anatomical science in great contempt. This note in Thomas Allan's journal shows how Mary Anning was as familiar with fish-remains as with reptiles; and her subsequent dealings with Agassiz, who acknowledges her help in correlating the spines with the appropriate teeth in various Liassic fishes, and with Sir Philip Egerton and Lord Enniskillen, whom she supplied with material, proved her to have kept as much in touch with slowly-won knowledge of Liassic fish anatomy, as she did with that of the saurians. The year following her first Plesiosaurus find Mary AIming was visited by the young geologist Murchison and the lady whom he had lately married. Murchison describes how he left his wife at Lyme .. to recruit there and amuse herself and
DE;\IOX STRATI OX AT TH E B RITI SH ;\Ili SE lJ;\L
67
become a good pr acti cal fossilist , by working with th e celebra te d Mary Anning of that place, and trudging with her (pa ttens on their feet ) alon g the shore." Three years lat er Mary Anning found the first British P terosaur , a form describ ed by Buckland as Pterodactylus macrony x. This, the third of her well-known di scoveries, is exh ibited in the fossil reptile gallery . In his extraordinar y "Memoirs of Ichthyosauri and Pl esiosauri " Thomas H awkins- " that worthy and eccentric m an of genius," as Sir Richard Owen called him-recounts in highly worded and picturesque lan gua ge the extraction of two s pecimens of I chthy osaurus at Lym e, and incidentally sketches Mary Anning with a few , incisive strokes. She readily sold him in 1832 the head of a lar ge I chthyosaurus, which she had found, assuming that no one could unearth the rem ain der of t he specimen which was deeply buried in a proj ecting pinnacle of cliff. But Hawkins hired an army of diggers, and , with leave granted by the owner of the land, tore the cliff down and secured the largest associated ichthyosaur shown in the galleries of this Department. Mary Anning, who watched the procee dings , helped him gat he r t ogether and pack the sca ttered bone s. During the next yea r H awkins purchased from the Cha rrnouth villager, who had discovered it, an ichthyosaur imbedded in the foreshore, an d approacha ble on ly at ex tre me low tide. H e had to wait for seve ral weeks before an off-shore wind helped the tide to eb b fa r enough for t he rem ain s to be exposed. He represents Mary Anni ng as gloomily foreboding his failure to extract the speci me n, and grimly pr ophesying its destruc tion through pyritic decay, if perchan ce he man aged t o secure it. He did , howeve r, obtain it, bu t ad mits that, as Mary Anning had warned him , it came near to perishing on bei ng dried. This spec imen may also be seen wit h others of H awkins' collectio n , exhibited in t he fossil reptile ga llery . We also read of Mar y Anning supplying seve ra l pakeontologist s with invertebrat e fossils, such as the cra b, Coleia aniiqua , t o Lord Enniskillen ; belemnites to John Phillips ; and the starfish, Ophioderma egertoni, to Adam Sedgwi ck. In 1844 the King of Saxony visited Lym e and was mu ch interest ed in Mary Arming 's shop, especially with a 6 ft. ichthyosaur, which was priced at £15. Soon after this Mary Arming' s health failed, and she died of cancer on March 9th, 1847. She was buried by her brother in Lyme churchyard, and a window to her memory was placed in Lyme church by the Vicar and some of the F ellows of t he Geological Society. At this time Mary Arming's form er fellowtownsman, De la Beche, was President of the Society, and in his address early in the following year gave an account of Mary Armin g's life and work, although she was not a F ellow, thus paying an honourabl e tribute to her useful life an d amia ble c ha racter,
" MARY ANNING, 'FOSSILIST.''' Report by W. D. LANG, Sc.D., F.R.S., F.G.S. T E E N Members assembled in the Hall, and were NI NEtaken to the Board Room, which, by the courtesy of the Director, had been lent for the occasion. There Dr. Dighton Thomas, on behalf of Dr. Lang, who was absent through illness, gave a lantern lecture on Mary Arming," and afterwards demonstrated to the members in the galleries of the Department of Geology various specimens with which Mary AIming had been associated. From very early times the fossils of the West Dorset coast were collected and sold as "curiosities" to the passengers of coaches going through Charmouth on their way between Dorchester and Exeter; and, after I758, fossils found a market in Lyme itself, when visitors began to frequent that town after it had been connected with Charmouth by a turnpike road. Richard Anning, a carpenter of Lyme, was one of those who supplemented his earnings by collecting and selling fossils to summer visitors; and Mary, his eldest child, would accompany him on the beach when he went on these excursions. Indeed, in later life, Mary claimed that she learned what she knew of fossils from her father; but this information must have been meagre compared with the knowledge which she subsequently acquired by her own experience. According to Roberts, Lyme's first historian, Richard Arming's wife ridiculed her husband's pursuit of fossils, and when he spent a holiday in this way, unless it was Good Friday or a Saint's Day (when, being a Dissenter, he collected fossils instead of going to church), she used to be very angry with him. Mary was born in I799. When she was yet an infant, her nurse and some companions were killed by lightning as they stood beneath a tree for shelter from the rain. Mary, although struck insensible, was revived. In I8IO Richard died of consumption; and one day in the same year Mary, carrying home an ammonite which she had found on the beach, met a lady visitor to Lyme, who offered her half-a-crown for the specimen. This incident, says Roberts, determined her to sell fossils for her living; and thus, at ten years old, she began a career that was soon to make her famous to her contemporaries as "the most eminent female fossilist." Within a year she had made a great discovery-the first associated I chiliyosaurus skeleton I A fuller account of .l\Iary Anning, with illustrations, has appeared in the .\. r-atural History
Magazine, 1935, vol, v., pp. 64-81.
Pxoc, GEOL. Assoc., VOL. XLVII., PARI
I,
1936.
5
66
W. D. LANG,
known to science; and we read of this child of eleven hiring men to disengage it from the stratum in which it lay, and selling it to the Lord of the Manor for £23. By this means she began to be known to scientists outside Lyme who were interested in the Lias, and in particular to William Buckland. She was already known to De la Beche, who then lived at Lyme, whence he had moved while still a boy from Charmouth. For more than a decade we hear little about Mary Arming, but during this time she was assiduously collecting fossils, and supplying the pioneer geologists with material. In 1824, however, she made her second great find in a nearly complete skeleton of Plesiosaurus, a genus which De la Beche and Conybeare had already named as new from some fragmentary material collected in the Bristol neighbourhood and possibly also from Lyme; but nothing like a complete skeleton was known, and Mary Arming's specimen caused a sensation in the geological world. It was bought by the Duke of Buckingham at a price variously quoted as £IOO, £150, and £200. The Duke lent it to Buckland for scientific examination; but Buckland allowed Conybeare to describe it, and there is still extant a letter, written by Conybeare to De la Beche, describing his delight at the discovery and at a sketch which Mary Anning had made of the creature; how he threw down the sermon he was writing, leaving it for his sister-in-law to copy out (and did she complete it ?) for the following Sunday, and lectured on the find to the Philosophical Club which he had founded among his country parishioners. This famous specimen may be seen in the fossil reptile gallery at the British Museum (Natural History). Mary Anning subsequently found other Plesiosaur skeletons, of which the most important was a new species described by Buckland as Plesiosaurus macrocephalus. The simple, friendly, and respectful letter in which she announced this find to Buckland is quite at variance with the statement of an amateur geologist who went along the shore with Mary Anning in 1824, collecting Hybodus spines-one Thomas Allan, who wrote in his journal that Miss Anning held Buckland's anatomical science in great contempt. This note in Thomas Allan's journal shows how Mary Anning was as familiar with fish-remains as with reptiles; and her subsequent dealings with Agassiz, who acknowledges her help in correlating the spines with the appropriate teeth in various Liassic fishes, and with Sir Philip Egerton and Lord Enniskillen, whom she supplied with material, proved her to have kept as much in touch with slowly-won knowledge of Liassic fish anatomy, as she did with that of the saurians. The year following her first Plesiosaurus find Mary AIming was visited by the young geologist Murchison and the lady whom he had lately married. Murchison describes how he left his wife at Lyme .. to recruit there and amuse herself and
DE;\IOX STRATI OX AT TH E B RITI SH ;\Ili SE lJ;\L
67
become a good pr acti cal fossilist , by working with th e celebra te d Mary Anning of that place, and trudging with her (pa ttens on their feet ) alon g the shore." Three years lat er Mary Anning found the first British P terosaur , a form describ ed by Buckland as Pterodactylus macrony x. This, the third of her well-known di scoveries, is exh ibited in the fossil reptile gallery . In his extraordinar y "Memoirs of Ichthyosauri and Pl esiosauri " Thomas H awkins- " that worthy and eccentric m an of genius," as Sir Richard Owen called him-recounts in highly worded and picturesque lan gua ge the extraction of two s pecimens of I chthy osaurus at Lym e, and incidentally sketches Mary Anning with a few , incisive strokes. She readily sold him in 1832 the head of a lar ge I chthyosaurus, which she had found, assuming that no one could unearth the rem ain der of t he specimen which was deeply buried in a proj ecting pinnacle of cliff. But Hawkins hired an army of diggers, and , with leave granted by the owner of the land, tore the cliff down and secured the largest associated ichthyosaur shown in the galleries of this Department. Mary Anning, who watched the procee dings , helped him gat he r t ogether and pack the sca ttered bone s. During the next yea r H awkins purchased from the Cha rrnouth villager, who had discovered it, an ichthyosaur imbedded in the foreshore, an d approacha ble on ly at ex tre me low tide. H e had to wait for seve ral weeks before an off-shore wind helped the tide to eb b fa r enough for t he rem ain s to be exposed. He represents Mary Anni ng as gloomily foreboding his failure to extract the speci me n, and grimly pr ophesying its destruc tion through pyritic decay, if perchan ce he man aged t o secure it. He did , howeve r, obtain it, bu t ad mits that, as Mary Anning had warned him , it came near to perishing on bei ng dried. This spec imen may also be seen wit h others of H awkins' collectio n , exhibited in t he fossil reptile ga llery . We also read of Mar y Anning supplying seve ra l pakeontologist s with invertebrat e fossils, such as the cra b, Coleia aniiqua , t o Lord Enniskillen ; belemnites to John Phillips ; and the starfish, Ophioderma egertoni, to Adam Sedgwi ck. In 1844 the King of Saxony visited Lym e and was mu ch interest ed in Mary Arming 's shop, especially with a 6 ft. ichthyosaur, which was priced at £15. Soon after this Mary Arming' s health failed, and she died of cancer on March 9th, 1847. She was buried by her brother in Lyme churchyard, and a window to her memory was placed in Lyme church by the Vicar and some of the F ellows of t he Geological Society. At this time Mary Arming's form er fellowtownsman, De la Beche, was President of the Society, and in his address early in the following year gave an account of Mary Armin g's life and work, although she was not a F ellow, thus paying an honourabl e tribute to her useful life an d amia ble c ha racter,