214 BOTANICAL INFORMATION. 
are flexible, slightly browned, and in a state of perfect car- 
bonization : those again, where the impressions of the bark are 
internally filled with stony matter: and, finally, such as present 
a complete fossilization, and have the entire mass, and all 
their several organs, cells and vessels, replete with petrifying 
substance, though they are not changed info stone, as such 
specimens are commonly, though erroneously, called. 
* In the coal of Silesia and of other countries, M. Goeppert 
has discovered and obtained several plants, still flexible, and 
which admitted of his dissecting their epidermis and organs 
of evaporation, and he has thus been enabled to ascertain how 
subterranean combustion has destroyed the tissue in other 
plants found in the same formation. He detected, in the 
Keuper formation, the branches of a tree analogous to the 
Birch, on which the flowers and pollen were still perfectly 
preserved ; and some fir-trees presented him with a similar. 
phenomenon. 
* [t is well known, that in the north of Europe, there 
occasionally falls from the skies, an enormous quantity of a 
yellow powder, which was once supposed to be sulphur, but 
which savans have pronounced to be the pollen of the Fir- 
blossom. Now, in Westerwald, Finland, Bohemia, and even 
in New York, this floral substance has been discovered in 
such great quantities deposited between layers of earth, and 
mingled with fossil Infusoria, that M. Goeppert is enabled 
to pronounce that the antediluvian world must have also pos- 
sessed its enormous forests of gigantic pines, whose yellow 
dust could not but obscure in its fall the light of day, since 
the masses of it are so thick and close-pressed, as even to 
raise the soil many feet. 
* We have already said that M. Goeppert MAKES fossil 
plants, and to prove how fossilization has actually taken place, 
this ingenious man so works with clay, fire and water, on ? 
given plant (and chiefly with the ferns, those vegetables © 
which the geological productions of our globe present the 
most perfect specimens), that he produces, in the course 9 
one year, by this moist process, such samples, and so admi- 
