166 Mr. Binney on the remarkable Fossil Trees 



the stem. On careful observation it is also to be found in the 

 upper and lower portions of most of the seams of coal, gene- 

 rally with its stringy appendages. It is also more rarely met 

 with in the roofs of coal mines and in sandstone rocks. The 

 specimens in the floors are by far the most numerous, and 

 they are frequently found to strike down from the lower part 

 of the coal into the clay underneath ; sometimes, where this 

 deposit is a thick one, at a considerable angle, and when it is 

 thin, nearly horizontal. 



Among the many authors who have written on this plant, 

 probably no one has shown so accurate a knowledge of it as 

 Mr. Steinhauer. In an elaborate paper printed in the first 

 volume of the new series of the American Philosophical Trans- 

 actions, he describes the most perfect form of die fossil as that 

 of a cylinder more or less compressed, and generally flatter 

 on one side than the other. Frequently the flattened side 

 turns in so as to form a groove. The surface is marked in 

 quincuncial order with pustules, or rather depressed areolae, 

 with a rising in the middle, in the centre of which rising a 

 minute speck is often observable. From different modes and 

 degrees of compression, and probably from different states of 

 the original vegetable, these areolae assume very different ap- 

 pearances, sometimes running into indistinct rimae like the 

 bark of an aged willow ; sometimes, as in the shale impres- 

 sions, exhibiting little more than a neat sketch of the concen- 

 tric circles. He was of opinion that the fibrous processes, 

 acini, spines, or whatever else they might be called, were cy- 

 lindrical, and that small fragments of these cylinders showed 

 distinctly a central line of (pith?) coinciding with the point in 

 the centre of the pustule, and that some of these extended to 

 the length of twenty feet. He also notices the groove of the 

 cylinder being always under, and suggests that the pith had 

 fallen down from the centre ; and after further details he con- 

 cludes, "that the stem was a cylindrical stem or root growing 

 in a direction nearly horizontal in the soft mud at the bottom 

 of freshwater lakes or seas, without branches, but sending out 

 fibres from all sides; that it was furnished in the centre with 

 a pith of a structure different from the surrounding wood or 

 cellular substance, more dense and distinct at the older end 

 of the plant, and more similar to the external substance to- 

 wards the termination which continued to shoot ; and perhaps 

 that besides this central pith there were longitudinal fibres 

 proceeding through the plant like those of the roots of Pteris 

 aquilina. With respect to any stem arising from it, if a creep- 

 ing trunk, we have hardly ground for a supposition." 



Messrs. Lindley and Hutton, after noticing at great length 



