E;*+ - Geological Curators

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Radioactive Minerals
NOTES AND NEWS
To date, only Sue Turner at The Hancock Museum has corresponded on this
matter following a visit from the Radioactive Safety Officer of the University.
Concern about a new display of potentially dangerous minerals was alleviated
on the advice that a slightly thicker than normal sheet of glass or lead glass
plus a wooden framework to the case would protect the visitors from nasty
emissions.
Radioactive minerals in the Reserve Collection, have been put in a large,
red, locked wooden box suitably marked!
An interesting selection of postage stamps depicting subjects of geological
interest can be found in "Decorative and Symbolic Uses of Vertebrate Fossils"
by K. P. Oakley in a publication by the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, number 12
in their series titled "Occasional Papers on Technology".
Plates VI, V111 and X show fossil reptiles and amphibians from places
like China and Angola and fossil mammals from Romania and Poland.
I am sure someone must have come across other branches of geology on
stamps. In retrospect, our own Post Office issue stamps for all sorts of
commemorations and surely there are suitable Geological Anniversaries that
could be similarly ranked - ideas please and perhaps we can get our geology
recognised worldwide.
GCG Literary Supplement
The following two passages have been submitted by members - can you
name the novels where they originated?
1. "The idea is to see Europe casually, you know, sort of vaguely, out of
the corner of the eye. All Baedekers and Michelins and museum catalogues
immediately discarded as too boring and too corny. Who wants to see a
pile of old stones anyway? The general 'feel' of the country is what
she ' S after" .
2. "His choice was easy; he would of course have gone wherever Ernestina's
health had required him to, but it must be confessed that the fact that
it was Lyme Regis had made his premarital obligations delightfully easy
to support. Stonebarrow, Black Ven, Ware Cliffs - these names may mean
very little to you. But Lyme is situated in the centre of one of the
rare outcrops of a stone known as blue lias. To the mere landscape
enthusiast this stone is not attractive. An exceedingly~gloomy grey in
colour, a petrified mud in texture, it is a good deal more forbidding than
it is picturesque. It is also treacherous since its strata are brittle
and have a tendency to slide, with the consequence that this little
stretch of twelve miles or so of blue lias coast has lost more land to
the sea in the course of history than almost any other in England. But