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Updated: June 23, 2025
In the villages around her hundreds of labourers were employed in digging for coprolites, a fossil which, when ground, is useful as manure. Among these men were many of the wildest wanderers, and Miss Macpherson's heart was deeply stirred for their spiritual welfare, and her time and strength were given to reach them by every means in her power.
We found specimens of a Planorbis in the mud of the stream, and saw apparently a boring shell in the alluvium, but could not land to examine it. Chalky masses of alligators' droppings, like coprolites, are very common, buried in the banks, which become twenty feet high at the junction with the Ganges, where we arrived on the 14th.
"Perhaps, I may know better when I get older." A book on the table attracted her by its beautiful binding. She took it up. Mrs. Gallilee looked at her with compassionate good humour. "Science again, my dear," she said facetiously, "inviting you in a pretty dress! You have taken up the 'Curiosities of Coprolites. That book is one of my distinctions a presentation copy from the author."
The crowd was so great that my father could not get near enough to see what it contained, but I may say here, that when, two days later, circumstances compelled him to have a close look at it, he saw that it consisted of about a dozen fine coprolites, deposited by some antediluvian creature or creatures, which, whatever else they may have been, were certainly not horses.
But it is not green, it is red. I know: but years ago it got the name from one green vein in it, in which the "Coprolites," as you learnt to call them at Cambridge, are found; and that, and a little layer of blue clay, called gault, between the upper Greensand and lower Greensand, runs along everywhere at the foot of the chalk hills. I see the hills now. Are they chalk?
Falconer discovered flint knives, bone splinters, bits of charcoal, burnt clay, and other objects indicating human intervention, mingled with entire land shells, teeth of horses, coprolites of hyaenas, and other bones, the whole agglutinated to one another and to the roof by the infiltration of water holding lime in solution.
No gnawed bones nor any coprolites were found by Schmerling. He therefore inferred that the caverns of the province of Liege had not been the dens of wild beasts, but that their organic and inorganic contents had been swept into them by streams communicating with the surface of the country.
Coprolites, the supposed fossilized remains of animals, which would probably contain about 40 to 50 per cent. of phosphate of lime, have been discovered in Mysore, and I am informed by an executive Engineer officer in the Mysore offices that they are to be found over an area of about two square miles, and at about a distance of seven miles from the Maddur Railway Station on the Bangalore Mysore line.
But who found out all this about the Coprolites? Ah I will tell you; and show you how scientific men, whom ignorant people sometimes laugh at as dreamers, and mere pickers up of useless weeds and old stones, may do real service to their country and their countrymen, as I hope you will some day.
The channel the glacier had chiselled was now full of shining honey-coloured water, hurrying over the granite stones and blocks of quartz and pretty vari-coloured pebbles, while the boulder sat high and dry, with the tall-plumed grasses, and the graceful tree-fern, and the yellow-tasselled mimosa crowding about its knees; and remembered old times, long before the little Bushfellow had outlined the koodoo and the buffalo, and the hunter-man with the spear, in black pigments on its smooth flank, ere he ground up the coprolites gathered from the river-bed for red and yellow paint to colour the drawings.
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