8 DR. HOOKER'S MISSION TO INDIA. 
merrily at sunrise ; and the accessories of a fresh air and dewy grass 
more reminded me of some moorland in the North of England than 
of the torrid regions of the East. 
At about 10 o'clock at night. I arrived at Mr. Williams’ camp, 
and received a most hearty welcome. His operations being finished, 
he was prepared to start on the following morning, and had kindly 
waited a couple of days for my arrival. 
Early on the morning of the last day of January, a motley group of 
Hindoos and Mussulmen were busy striking the tents, and loading 
the bullocks, bullock-carts and elephants: these proceeded on the 
march, occupying in straggling groups nearly three miles of road, 
whilst we remained to breakfast with T. Watkins, Esq., the intelligent 
superintendent of the Hast India Coal and Coke Company, who are 
working the seams surveyed by Williams. The jungle I found to con- 
sist chiefly of thorny bushes, Zizyphus ? of two species, an Acacia and 
Butea frondosa, the twigs of the latter often covered with lurid red 
tears of Lac, which is collected here in abundance from this plant. As 
it occurs on the plants and is collected by the natives it is called Stick- 
lac, but after preparation Shell-lac. A friend has promised to procure 
for me the gum in different states of preparation, which, with a few 
such articles as the red sealing-wax, some native boxes for holding it, 
picked up at the bazaar, &c., will illustrate this branch of Economic 
Botany in your museum. 
The coal crops out at the surface; but the shafts worked are sunk 
through thick beds of alluviumwhich overlie the coal shafts. In the latter 
those fossils are preserved of which Williams sent so splendid a series 
to our Museum of Economie Geology, and which were taken from 
abandoned shafts, to which I could not of course have access. The 
genera to which the fossils belong are partly English, some Australian, 
and many peculiar to the Indian coal-field. The English are more 
allied to those of the oolite formation of that country than to the lower - 
coal ; but I am far from supposing that this argues any necessary refer- 
ence of these Indian beds to the oolite period: the proportion of 
novelty is far too great. Arguing from analogy, too, we may pres 
that contemporaneous Floras of two countries so widely apart as India 
south of the Ganges and England, would be represented by totally 
different plants; amongst which the presence of the same species, 
common to both, would be accidental. The oolite fossils of England 
