STEVENSON— INTERRELATIONS OF THE FOSSIL FUELS. 43 



had received from Purpesseln near Gumbinnen in East Prussia a 

 peat, so peculiar that he visited the I'ocahty to learn its mode of 

 occurrence. The moor was of moderate size and shaped like the 

 figure 8, the broad portions being joined by a narrow strip. In the 

 northern division, under a cover of one foot, he found Wiesentorf, 

 9 feet thick, black-brown and excellent fuel, containing many hard 

 roots and fragments of stems. This overlies 5 feet of " Lebertorf," 

 which is almost homogeneous, green-brown, very elastic, with coarse 

 conchoidal fracture, with no trace of leaf structure and in appear- 

 ance almost like animal liver. Occasionally, a root fragment occurs. 

 The substance can be ground to powder under water. 



When dried, Lebertorf is wholly different. It is grayish-black 

 and almost invariably laminated, but the laminae are irregular, with 

 no great extent, often as thin as paper and at times in meshes. It 

 parts very slowly with its water ; dried by exposure to the air, it is 

 hard and, when cut with a knife, has brilliant black surface like jet. 

 Under the microscope, fresh Lebertorf is found to consist of minute, 

 light, grayish-brown granules with no trace of structure; bits of 

 crustacean tests and well-preserved pollen of P'mus sylvestris are 

 abundant ; with them are occasional disintegrated parts of plants, 

 showing cell structure. The southern portion of the moor seems 

 to have only an insignificant trace of Lebertorf, the ordinary peat 

 resting directly on the impermeable blue marly clay. 



In 1883, von GumbeP'' examined Lebertorf from Purpesseln and 

 discovered that it has a felted structure. It contains some insect 

 remains, leaves of grasses and mosses, many round balls, probably 

 spores, and vast quantities of pollen grains, more than 1,000 to the 

 cubic millimeter. Specimens from Kimmersdorf, near Gesterode, 

 and from Doliewen, about 100 miles east from Konigsberg, agree in 

 that the cross section shows a uniformly dense mass composed of 

 dull material like Boghead. The laminae are exceedingly thin and 

 contain clear yellow particles and lens-like segregations of red-brown 

 tint along with several thousand pollen grains to the cubic centi- 

 meter. He was impressed by the extraordinary resemblance to 

 cannel and conceived that both substances originated in the same way. 



33 C. W. V. Gumbel, " Beitrage," etc., pp. 132, 133. 



