Amplexus coraUoides Sowerby. 393 



thing of the kind). In both kinds of instances the crop has, 

 I think, been produced in the first season of growth (spring, 

 summer, autumn), which has succeeded the time at which 

 the soil was exposed ; and if it have been produced so shortly 

 subsequent, the agency of birds would be insufficient to convey 

 to the soil seeds numerous enough for the production of the 

 plants. 



In V. 196. is a communication by J. A. H., in which is 

 noted the fact of plants appearing on ground off whose face 

 turf had been pared, and these plants distinct in kind from 

 those which had occupied the ground before the turf had been 

 pared off. W. C. Trevelyan, Esq., has made, in a communi- 

 cation lying by us on a certain i^Yimaria, which, with F. capreo- 

 lata and F. officinalis, grows on the Calton Hill, Edinburgh, 

 this remark, pertinent to the subject of that by J. A. H. : — 

 " These plants [the three fumarias] appear on the Calton 

 Hill only after the soil has been recently turned up : how 

 long the seeds may have been buried under the surface, it is 

 difficult to say. If the spot has never previously been culti- 

 vated, they must have been deposited at a very distant period 

 by plants which had been growing there before the appearance 

 of the grass which lately covered the hill, the growth of which 

 soon destroys [? suspends that of ] the jFumaria3." — TV. C. 

 Trevelyan. Wallington, Newcastle on Tytie, Sept. 22. 1832. 



[Amplexus coraUoides Sowerby. — Our correspondent, H. 

 B. of Blois, sent us, in the early part of 1833, a drawing of 

 a fossil object present in the pillars of black and white marble 

 of his room at Chambord, France ; on which he thus re- 

 marks : — " The figure [object] is white on the black ground, 

 and so very clear and distinct, as to show evidently that it had 

 retractile powers [corrugations are depicted], and that it was 

 armed with spines. The after part seems as if it had been 

 crushed." The drawing we submitted to Mr. J. D. C. Sow- 

 erby, who informed us that it was of the Amplexus coraUoides. 

 He very kindly added, that this species, which was, when 

 published in the Mineral Conchology, deemed a shell, has been 

 found to be a coral, related to the madrepores, and that it is 

 constant in the lower beds of carboniferous limestone (that is, 

 the black marble) in Lancashire and in Ireland. Mr. Gil- 

 bertson's communication, in p. 119., enables us to add the 

 Isle of Man to the list of localities. Mr. Sowerby remarked 

 that the possibility of this fossil proving not a shell one is 

 bespoken, as it were, in the names Amplexus coraUoides. 

 We have since observed that Mr. R. C. Taylor has set it 

 down as a M coralloid rather than a multilocular shell?" in a 

 note in II. 35.] 



Vol. VIII. — No. 51. ee 



