2-979-051 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Specimens of Fossils recently found at Tingewick, Bucks., 1857. 'Mr. Stowe, surgeon, of Buckingham, upon washing some hundreds of the fossils, ascertained them to be marine vegetation, which, if it had not grown where it was found, had been washed out of the chalk range, as most of the fossils are striated or intersected by thin veins of chalk...the number of them is incalculable, as they extend over many square yards of the field, and are as thick in the clay in which they are found as pebbles in a street. Many of them are like biscuits, others like lilliputian mince-pies and oysters. Others are like roots of ginger and compressed mushrooms of all sizes - the smaller or button-shaped ones simulating the mince-pies, and the larger ones so like biscuits that at an evening party they were put on the supper-table and were taken for real biscuits'. From "Illustrated London News", 1857.