296 FOSSIL FLORA OF THE 



fossil plant. Mr. Witham, to whom Fossil Botany has been greatly- 

 indebted, found in the coal-measures at Ushaw, in Durham, a fragment 

 of a fossil ; it had no pretensions to beauty, and would have been 

 cast aside by an incompetent observer ; yet this unpromising-looking 

 fragment could, by the interrogations of Science, tell its own history, 

 and give us a glimpse of the state of the world at a far-distant era ; 

 for, when a transverse section was placed under a microscope, its 

 exogenous structure was evinced ; no concentric circles were discovered, 

 but medullary rays ci'ossed elongated cellules which were similar to 

 those in Coniferse or Cone-bearing trees ; a longitudinal section more 

 distinctly revealed the affinity of the fossil, for the walls of the cells 

 were covered with roundish or oval areolae or glands. Now these 

 are found on the cells of no other plants excepting the Coniferee and 

 Zamise ; but the combined evidence of both sections proved that the 

 fossil was a fragment of a Cone-bearing Tree similar to the Pinus 

 Strobus, or Weymouth Pine, a native of Canada and the more northern 

 districts of North America. These relics of a former vegetation were 

 noble forest trees. At Granton, near Edinburgh, and in the Newcastle 

 coal-field they have been found 70 feet long; but while some of them 

 have their type in the northern hemisphere, others resemble those 

 which chiefly flourish in the southern ; their analogue is to be seen in 

 the Araucarias — in the Altingia excelsa, or Norfolk Pine, which, 

 growing to the height of 200 feet, and clothed with an abundant 

 foliage, gives magnificence, beauty, and picturesqueness to the scenery 

 of southern lands. 



About 300 species of plants from the Carboniferous formation of 

 Great Britain have been described ; but, with the exception of 

 Coniferse and Ferns, few of them have a close affinity to existing 

 families of plants. Indeed, on going down a coal-pit a few hundred 

 feet deep, we meet with an entombed Flora, as different from that 

 growing on the surface, as that is which is seen in another hemisphere. 

 Not only are the floral forms strange, they are even frequently beau- 

 tiful in their rocky sepulchres. One of the finest passages in 

 Dr. Buckland's Bridgewater Treatise is a description of what he saw 

 in the coal-mines of Bohemia. "The most delicate imitations of 

 living foliage upon the painted ceilings of Italian palaces," he says, 

 " bear no comparison with the beauteous profusion of extinct vegetable 

 forms, with which the galleries of these instructive coal-mines are 

 overhung. The roof is covered as with a canopy of gorgeous tapestry 

 enriched with festoons of most graceful foliage, flung in wild irregular 

 profusion, over every portion of its surface. The effect is heightened 

 by the contrast of the coal-black colour of these vegetables with the 

 light groundwork of the rock to which they are attached. The 

 spectator feels himself transported, as if bj- enchantment, into forests of 

 another world ; he beholds Trees, of forms and characters unknown 

 upon the surface of the earth, presented to his senses, almost in the 

 beauty and vigour of primaeval life ; their scaly stems and bending 

 branches, with their delicate apparatus of foliage, are all spread out 

 before him, little impaired by the lapse of countless ages, and bearing 

 faithful records of extinct systems of vegetation, which began and 

 terminated in times of which these relics arc the infallible historians." 



