[FOR THE USE OF MEMBERS.] 
Ropal Fustitution of Great Britain. 
1853. 
WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 
Friday, March 18. 
Wit. Pots, Esq., M.A., F.R.S., Treasurer, and Vice-President, 
in the Chair. 
Sir C. Lyset, F.R.S., V.P.G.S., &c. 
On the discovery of some fossil reptilian remains, and a land-shell in 
the interior of an erect fossil-tree in the Coal measures of Nova 
Scotia, with remarks on the origin of Coal-fields, and the time re- 
quired for their formation. 
Tue entire thickness of the carboniferous strata, exhibited in one 
uninterrupted section on the shores of the Bay of Fundy, in Nova 
Scotia, at a place called the South Joggins and its neighbourhood, 
was ascertained by Mr. Logan, to be 14,570 feet. The middle part 
of this vast series of strata having a thickness of 1400 feet, abounds 
in fossil forests of erect trees together with root-beds, and thin 
seams of coal. These coal-bearing strata were examined in detail 
by Mr. J. W. Dawson of Pictou, and Sir C. Lyell in September 
last (1852), and among other results of their investigations they 
obtained satisfactory proof that several Sigillariz standing in an 
upright position, or at right angles to the planes of stratification, 
were provided with stigmarie as roots. Such a relation between 
Sigillaria and Stigmaria had, it is true, been already established by 
Mr. Binney of Manchester, and had been suspected some years before 
on botanical grounds by M. Adolphe Brongniart; but as the fact 
was still doubted by some geologists both in Europe and America, it 
was thought desirable to dig out of the cliffs, and expose to view, 
several large trunks with their roots attached. These were observed 
to bifurcate several times, and to send out rootlets in all directions 
into the clays or ancient soils in which they had grown. Such soils 
or underclays with Stigmaria afford more conclusive evidence of 
ancient terrestrial surfaces than even erect trees, as the latter might 
be conceived to have been drifted and fixed like snags in a river’s 
bed. In the strata 1400 feet thick above mentioned root-bearing 
soils were observed at sixty-eight different levels ; and like the seams 
of coal which usually cover them, they are at present the most 
_ destructible masses in the whole cliff, the sandstones and laminated 
shales being harder and more capable of resisting the action of the 
m= No, 15. xX 
