ATHENE A Journal of NATURAL HISTORY and Microscopy Summer, 1962 No. 3 Published by The Oldham Microscopical Society and Field Club ATHENE NOCTUA VIDALIl Editor : L. N. KIDD, F.L.S., F.R.E.S. Assistant Editor : R. J. STANTON, M.A. Price 2/6 OLDHAM MICROSCOPICAL SOCIETY AND FIELD CLUB ESTABLISHED 1864 Headquarters: Werneth Park Study Centre and Natural History Museum, Oldham President: A. HUMPHREYS, ESQ. Meetings held weekly at the Society's Headquarters on Monday evenings at 7-30 p.m. Outdoor Meetings also held during summer months, usually on Saturday. Members are entitled to borrow books from the Society's Library and to make use of the instruments. Annual Subscription 10/- Junior Members (under 18) 5/- Further particulars and copy of the current syllabus obtainable from: — The Hon. Secretary, Mr. L. N. KIDD, 7, Kinders Crescent, Greenfield, Nr. Oldham. Further copies of ' Athene ' can be obtained from : — The Publications Secretary, Miss A. C. CHADDERTON, 78, Oldham Road, Grasscroft, Nr. Oldham, or from The Society's Headquarters Orders should be accompanied by postal order or cheque for 2/6, plus 4d. postage. SNAILING WITH FRED TAYLOR By JOHN ARMITAGE, F.R.P.S., F.R.E.S., M.B.O.U. At an early age, I was profoundly interested in everytliing said and done by Mr. Fred Taylor the Oldham conchologist and ornithologist, and rambles arranged hy the local Natural History Society were invariably enriched by his presence and his lucid remarks concerning the birds and moUusca we encountered. Thanks to encouragement and expert guidance, which later developed into a lifelong friendship, I soon became conversant with the land and freshwater snails of the doughs, canals, ponds and marshes of a limited area in South-East Lancashire. In August, 1914—prior to becoming a student at the Oldham School of Art—I spent a holiday at Portland in Dorset, and returned with a rich haul of shells whose original owners were largely associated with the oolitic limestone. The First World War started, but during the three years that followed, it made little impact on me, and somehow my studies as an art student dovetailed beautifully with natural history pursuits. Watching Mr. Taylor, sometimes for hours on end, at work in a somewhat grimy countryside, dredging with metal scoop or rooting among decayed herbage, I realized gradually that relentless persistence often scored where a less thorough approach would have failed. On numerous occasions at his home, I observed Mr. Taylor's exacting procedure, laboriously boiling and cleaning his finds, later selecting and boxing choice shells of the finest quality and writing on the underside of each box the all-important data. There were always plenty of duplicates for his friends and admirers of the Conchological Society, whom he met on outdoor excursions in Lancashire and Cheshire during the summer months and at the Manchester Museum in winter. Certain kinds of land snails, both large and small, produce delicate shafts of carbonate of lime used in courtship and known as " love-darts," and Mr. Taylor was a positive genius at extracting them from the animals, cutting away the dart-sacs, dissolving away the fleshy parts in a weak solution of caustic potash warmed up in a test tube, and finally, after repeated washings, there were the darts, ready for mounting, that of each species being distinctive in form. Those Portland shells formed the nucleus of my growing collection amassed and hoarded with schoolboy enthusiasm; and, naturally, I was ever ready to receive and treasure my friend's duplicates—most of which to this day are in superb condition, and they have been appreciated frequently by my fellow-members of the Yorkshire Conchological Society, whose distinguished history goes hack further than the parent body in London. sixty-three Mr. Taylor joined the Conchological Society in 1895, but Dr. J. W. Jackson, a contemporary of his and collaborator in matters moUuscan, tells me that from the records, there is evidence that he exhibited shells from the Oldham district at the Manchester meetings as early as 1892; and it was the Society's list of species and main varieties of the British land and freshwater mollusca published in that year which he used throughout his collection. A census of the country's snails together with a revised list was compiled in 1902, and a new list of British Non-Marine Mollusca was published in 1941, adding to the confusion of several subgenera and countless synonyms so baffling to the beginner. To the last, in ordinary shell-conversation, Mr. Taylor used the names printed in the 1892 list with its simple genera such as Helix, Hyalinia and Clausilia, and these names occur in his collection of local shells presented to Oldham in 1898, exhibited and described at the Conchological Society during the previous December, a paper enumerating 58 species being published in the journal for April, 1898. Fred Taylor (1871-1949) lived a full life in which most of his leisure was devoted to birds and their eggs and snails and their shells; and with his wife, I found them the most constant and unchanging of friends, although one was a specialist and the other a kindly and tolerant soul knowing practically nothing of her husband's wholehearted hobby, yet in almost daily contact with trays and drawers of specimens throughout their married life. Years after the first war was over, an enquiry at 42, Landseer Street was met with Mrs. Taylor's unvarying reply. I would open brightly with; "Good evening, Mrs. Taylor; is Mr. Taylor in?" The greeting was; "Hello, Jack; come in; yes, Fred's playing with his shells." Bird and snail lore mingled with Mrs. Taylor's amusing gossip (she was tremendously interested in folk), and this sort of thing continued on and off for about thirty-five years; and I still remember both vividly with gratitude and affection. Apart from the operculate shell Amnicola taylori which he discovered at the opening of the present century, Mr. Taylor took immense numbers of a few common species occurring locally, collecting them year after year from a certain length of a canal or a particular mill lodge, noting the annual peak period and occasionally finding the mollusc in great quantity with a certain proportion hearing distorted shells and a few of exceptional size. So, for example, he scooped up lots of the Great Pond Snail Limnaea stagnalis from Droylsden canal; and in 1940 he found giants and freaks unique in 50 years of collecting. Many were curiously malformed, and in my illustration showing five of the shells half-size, the first only is normal. No. 2 has a reflexcd lip; No. 3 has a pronounced raised ridge; No. 4 bears an outgrown lip; while No. 5 in addition to being abnormally angular in the main whorl is strongly banded with white and brown. sixty-four Together, we dredged several mill lodges of the Oldham district; and down the years our collections of the North American Bladder Snail Physa heterostropha assumed formidable proportions, the largest and most colourful shells being found in the Bedford Mill lodge, while stunted and ill-nourished forms came from the contaminated lodge of a rubber works at Hollinwood. A bad habit among unenterprising naturalists is to revisit localities shown by pioneers to be productive and to avoid unworked areas because they might prove to be a waste of time. James Purdy, a fellow art student, and I were regular visitors to the snail-thronged ponds at Fitton Hill, a few favoured spots at Riversvale, and a shady, insignificant bank below the canal at Bardsley where the Hollowed Glass Snail Hyalinia excavatus could be found in plenty. Later, we turned up fresh and profitable collecting places to the great delight of Mr. Taylor; and some time I will recall our joint discoveries and the best of my late friend's trips further afield. THE FORMATION OF COAL By W. F. EDWARDS Oldham is situated on the Eastern edge of the Lancashire coalfield, and in the past, many millions of tons of coal have been mined in our own locality. Although most of the workable coal has now been extracted, the story of how it got there in the first place is extremely interesting. If we are to believe geologists, this area was once a small part of a vast steaming swamp thickly covered by vegetation, but not vegetation of the kind that grows in Oldham today. There were no flowering plants and no trees with hard woody trunks and innumerable branches like our oak or ash trees, although some of the plants did contain woody tissues. Instead there were many plants resembling our present day clubmosses, Lycopodiales, except that they grew to about 100ft. in beight, others like modern horsetails, Equisetales, which grew to 50ft. or more, and large quantities of fern-like plants, Pteridosperms, some of which may have reproduced like true ferns, and others which may have produced seeds. sixty-five These plants, and many others, are thought to have grown ahout 250 million years ago in an area which was gradually sinking, so that in various parts of the huge swampland, thick layers of dead vegetation very often became covered over by layers of mud and sand which was washed down by rivers. The layers of mud and sand preserved and compressed the dead vegetation and as the layers accumulated, the vegetable matter became coal and the layers of sediment became layers of rock, hence the term sedimentary rocks. As a result, in coal-bearing strata, we find many seams or layers of coal, one on top of the other, contained amongst very many more layers of shale and sandstone, etc.