I860.] GEOLOGY AND MINERALOGY. 81 



in North Wales. — Further, in the case of those Calcareous 

 deposits which owe their very existence to the vast development 

 of Organisms that possessed the power of separating Carbonate of 

 Lime from the ocean-waters, temperature may be pretty certainly 

 assumed to be the chief condition, not merely of the character of 

 the Animal remains which those formations may include, but of 

 the very production of their solid material." 



Calamites and Calamodendron. — {Flora of the Carhoni- 

 feroxis Strata.) — Binney, Memoirs of Palaeontographical 

 Society, vol. xxi. 



A wit who had been bored with the inspection of the stony 

 treasures of a "fossil" botanist, once said that the latter had 

 shown him all his "Calamities and felicities," and Mr. Binney 

 would seem to agree as to the character of the Calamites, since 

 he endeavours, though apparently with some scruples, to ex- 

 tinguish the genus altogether. On this point we must take issue 

 with him, and try to maintain the cause of the proscribed Calamite. 

 The case stands thus: In the coal formation, one of the most com- 

 mon kinds of fossil plants is that on which the genera Calamites 

 and Calamodendron or C damitea have been founded. They have 

 cylindrical stems, with longitudinal narrow ribs and transverse 

 joints. This is the common character of the whole, but when 

 more narrowly examined they resolve themselves into two distinct 

 groups. The first and most common is that including stems with 

 somewhat flat ribs, coated with a very thin coaly bark, and 

 having, when well preserved, at the top of each rib where it 

 reaches one of the transverse joints, a round or oval mark or 

 cicatrice from ^hich a leaf or branchlet has been broken off. 

 Plants of this kind are seen erect in the sandstones, with their 

 outer bark perfectly preserved, and with their roots and leaves 

 attached. The writer has specimens of two species in his collec- 

 tion, showing the leaves in one species and the thin branchlets 

 bearing leaves in another, attached to the surface of the cylindrical 

 jointed ribbed stem, and he has other specimens as unequivocally 

 showing the bases of such stems, giving off roots and also budding 

 out into secondary stems. Farther, such stems were d< scribed 

 and figured by him in the Journal of the Geological Society, vol. 

 X., p. 35, in a paper to which Mr. Binney does not refer, though 

 he mentions other papers in which the fact is less explicitly 

 noticed. It may be added that Goeppert and Geinitz have shewn 



Vol. I. Q No. 1. 



