ABSTRACT
The Ordnance Geological Survey was established in 1835 with De la Beebe as its director. De la Beche was in an unstable position and defensive mood apropos the Survey when in November 1836 he asked John Phillips to identify Cornish fossil specimens collected by it. In 1838 De la Beche transformed Phillips' voluntary and unpaid connection with the Survey into a contractual, paid, yet temporary ad hoc arrangement. Phillips was an experienced field surveyor, mapper, and geologist as well as a palaeontologist who illustrated his works with his own drawings of fossils. Though Palaeozoic fossils was ostensibly an illustrated catalogue of fossils, it also vindicated Murchison's Devonian interpretation of Devon but it opposed the notion that there were well defined geological systems such as the Devonian. Phillips concluded that the fossils of south Devon had a strong affinity with those of the Eifel and Bensberg and that all of them belonged to the middle palaeozoic era.
