No. 1.] SIR WILLIAM EDMOND LOGAN. 33 



shewing that the undercluy was the soil in which the plants 

 grew which were afterwards converted into coal. Of the 100 

 thick and thin coal-seams in the South Wales coal-field, he 

 found that not a single one was without an uuderclay, and the 

 inference appeared to be that there was some essential connec- 

 tion between the production of the one and the existence of the 

 other. " To account," said he, "for the unfailing combination 

 by drift, seems an unsatisfactory hypothesis; but whatever may 

 be the mutual dependance of the phenomena, they give us rea. 

 sonable grounds to suppose that in the Stigmaria ficoides we 

 have the plant to which the earth is mainly indebted for those 

 vast stores of fossil fuel which are now so indispensable to the 

 comfort and prosperity of its inhabitants." 



So much did he become interested in this subject that in the 

 following year (1841) he crossed to America, and visited the 

 coal-fields of Pennsylvania and Nova Scotia, in order to ascertain 

 whether the same conditions existed there. Such he found to be 

 the case ; and in the following Spring he read an interesting- 

 paper before the Geological Society, the object of which, to use 

 his own words, "was to state the occurrence immediately below 

 the coal-seams of America of the same Stigmaria bsds as had 

 been observed below those of South Wales, and to shew the im- 

 portance of this prevailing fact." Shortly after his return from 

 America, he also visited coal-seams in the neighbourhood of Fal- 

 kirk, Scotland, there too finding the Stigmaria clays beneath the 

 coal. 



It was during his visit to Nova Scotia, in 1841, that he dis- 

 covered in the Lower Coal measusures of Horton Bluff the foot- 

 prints of a reptilian animal — a discovery which perhaps failed 

 to attract as much attention as it deserved, although it was the 

 first instance in which any trace of Teptiles had been detected as 

 low down in the geological scale as the Carboniferous. The 

 winter of 1841-42 was also spent in Canada, and the facts ob- 

 tained for a paper on the packing of ice in the St. Lawrence, 

 which was subsequently read before the Geological Society of 

 Loudon. 



Such, briefly, was the career of Logan previous to his ap- 

 pointment as Director of the Geological Survey of Canada. 

 Already he had acquired a reputation in Britain as a geologist, 

 aud had given himself the best of trainings for the work upon 

 which he was about to enter on this side of the Atlantic. But 

 what was meantime passing in Canada ? 



