NIPADITES OF BELGIUM. 191 
_ seed-vessels of several species of Nipadites abound in the Isle 
_ of Sheppey, and have not been observed in any other loca- 
: lity in England, tends to support this opinion. 
Carpolithes of this kind occur in great perfection in the 
Eocene strata of Belgium, and were figured and described, 
nearly seventy years since, in Burton’s “ Oryctographie de 
Bruxelles,” as petrified cocoa-nuts ; the uncompressed state 
in which these fossils occur makes the resemblance to the 
recent fruit more striking than in the flattened pyritous 
specimens from the clay of Sheppey. 
The Nipadites of Brussels have recently been brought 
under the more immediate notice of English geologists, in 
a memoir “On the Tertiary Strata of Belgium and French 
Flanders,” by Sir Charles Lyell, in which several specimens 
are figured and described.* These fossils are found in sands 
and sandstone, presumed to be of the age of the Bracklesham 
beds of Sussex. They are procured from Schaerbeek, in the 
northern suburbs of Brussels, where extensive quarries are 
worked for paving-stones, and have long been celebrated for 
remains of turtles, trunks of palms, and dicotyledonous trees, 
and the fruits, now called Nipadites. The vegetable remains 
often occur silicified ; Sir C. Lyell was shown by the work- 
men “the trunk of a petrified exogenous tree, with forty 
rings of annual growth ; it had lain in a horizontal position, 
and was bored by teredine. ‘The silicified base of the trunk 
of a Palm-tree, apparently broken off short at about the level 
of the soil, had numerous air-roots, or rootlets, attached.” T 
Of the thirteen species of Nipadites enumerated by Mr. 
Bowerbank, some of which are, however, only accidental 
varieties, four have been identified among those obtained 
from Schaerbeek: two of them belong to but one species— 
* Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. viii. 
August 1852. 
+ “On the Belgian Tertiary Formations,” Geol. Journal, vol. viii. 
p. 344. 
