182 REVIEWS. [June, 



Natural History Review. October^ 1859. London : Williams 



and Norgate. 



Tlie first work noticed in the ^Natural History E-eview/ is 

 the ' Diary of a Journey from the Mississijipi to the coasts of 

 the Pacific with a United States' Government Expedition ; by 

 Baldwin Mollhausen/ In the course of this journey the tra- 

 veller met with a '^remarkable formation of silicified stems of 

 trees in situ, or partly thrown down." " As we proceeded further 

 we really thought we saw before us masses of wood that had 

 been floated hither^ or even a tract of woodland where the timber 

 had been felled for the purposes of cultivation. Trees of all 

 sizes lay irregularly scattered about, and amongst them stumps 

 with the roots that had been left standing ; some of them were 

 more than sixty feet long, and of corresponding girth, and look- 

 ing as if they had been cut into irregular blocks, whilst broken 

 branches and chips lay heaped up near. 



'' On a closer examination we found they were fossil trees that 

 had been gradually washed there by the torrents, and had broken 

 off by their own weight, and that, singularly enough, in logs of 

 from one to three feet in length. We measured some of the 

 largest trunks, and found one of five feet in diameter. Many of 

 them were hollow ; many looked as if half-burnt, and they were 

 mostly of a dark colour, but not so much as to prevent the bark, 

 the Ijurnt places, the rings, and the cracks in the wood from 

 being clearly discernible. 



" In some of the blocks appeared the most beautiful blending 

 of agate and jasper colours; and in others, which had yielded to 

 the influence of the weather, and fallen to pieces, there were bits 

 so brilliantly tinted that, if polished and set, they would have 

 made elegant ornaments; others, again, had not yet lost the 

 original colour of their wood, and looked so like decaying beams 

 of deal, that one felt tempted to convince one^ self, by the 

 touch, of their petrifaction. If you pushed these, they fell 

 into pieces that had the appearance of rotten planks. We col- 

 lected small specimens of all these various kinds of fossil 

 trees, and regretted that as our means of transport were so 

 small, we had to content ourselves with fragments, which cer- 



