STEVENSON— INTERRELATIONS OF THE FOSSIL FUELS. 133 



bed ; at one excavation, the beds are so near together that they are 

 mined as one, but elsewhere they must be mined separately. 



According to Katzer, the Bohemian brown coals belong to the 

 Miocene. Grand'Eury^^* says that at Steinkirche near Budweis in 

 southern Bohemia, the mass of lignite, at the bottom of a superficial 

 basin, filled with sand, lignitic clay, wood, herbaceous plants and 

 roots, is a forest peat covered with mud. Katzer^®^ reports that in 

 the Budweis area he saw a coal bed, consisting of an upper bench, 

 3 decimeters thick, with stems almost completely coaled, and a lower 

 bench consisting mostly of Moor- and Erdkohle. At another place, 

 a bed, 2 meters thick, holds here and there, a great abundance of 

 stems and is so pyritous that it is utilized in the manufacture of 

 vitriol. The same author^^^ has described the Grottauer beds on the 

 Neisse River, immediately south from the border of Saxony, which 

 are in the middle or lower Miocene. In one shaft, 45 meters deep, 

 47 layers of alternating coal and shale were crossed. The important 

 bed, reached at 4 meters from the surface, has four benches of coal, 

 in all 10.35 meters, separated by three thin partings of clay and shale. 

 Another shaft shows similar alternations but the succession differs 

 somewhat, the second and third partings being irregular, sometimes 

 absent. The principal bed has an extreme thickness locally of 16 

 meters in the western part of the trough, where dips rarely exceed 



5 degrees and the beds show little evidence of disturbance, aside 

 from crevices in the coal. The eastern wing of the trough is much 

 disturbed, faults and folds occur frequently while the crevices in the 

 coal, often still open and half a meter wide, extend downward 5 or 



6 meters. Sulphates, chiefly alum, are shown on the walls of these 

 crevices. 



The Grottauer brown coal consists very largely of " fossilized 

 wood." Freshly removed from the mine, it has a wood-earthy ap- 

 pearance; but when dried the blocks not only preserve the wood 

 structure but show also the forms of stems, roots and branches, all 



^®* C. Grand'Eury, " Sur la formation des couches de Stipite," etc., 

 Comptcs Rendus, T. 130, 1900, p. 1688. 



185 F. Katzer, " Geologic von Bohmen," Prag, 2te Aufl., 1892, p. 1425. 



186 F. Katzer, Ocstcrr. Zeitsch. f. Berg, und Hittt., Bd. XLV., 1897. Sepa- 

 rate, pp. 5-18. 



