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but "none of them bearing the least resemblance to Bovey coal." 

 In 1797 Mr. Hatchett brought the subject before the Linnean 

 Society, in a paper in which his object seems to have been the refu- 

 tation of the mineral theory of Dr. Milles. In his ' History of Exeter/ 

 published in 1802, Mr. Brice next gave an account of the deposit, 

 and the state of the lignite workings ; he supposed the basin to have 

 formerly been a stagnant lake or morass into which trees were suc- 

 cessively transported from the neighbouring slopes. The twelfth 

 letter in Parkinson's 'Organic Remains,' published in 1804, appears 

 to have been written by Mr. Scammell, of Bovey Tracey, and is de- 

 voted to the lignite ; from it we learn that the coal had been worked 

 upwards of ninety years, and that the trees found in the bog, men- 

 tioned by Dr. Maton, were of the fir kind. Mr. Vancouver, in his 

 ' General View of the Agriculture of the County of Devon,' pub- 

 lished in 1 808, supposes the lignite to have been the product of pine 

 forests which grew where it is found, and that clay and other 

 moveable matter must have been poured over them, in a fluid state, 

 at different periods, from the craggy eminences around. Mr. Austen, 

 in his ' Memoir on the Geology of the South-east of Devonshire,' 

 states that the Bovey beds rest on a gravel equivalent to the lowest 

 tertiary deposits, and is thus the first writer who addresses himself 

 to the chronology of the formation. He makes the overlying gravels 

 post-tertiary, but belonging to the " period prior to the most recent 

 changes of relative level of land and water and of climate." Sir H. 

 De la Beche, in his ' Report of Cornwall, Devon, &c.,' expresses 

 surprise and regret that, excepting the lignite itself, no organic 

 remains have been detected in the deposit, so that we are deprived of 

 any aid by which it may be referred to any particular geological 

 date ; and adds that " if the wood be, as has been supposed, analogous 

 to oak and other existing trees, we should suppose the Bovey beds to 

 have been formed towards the latter part of the supracretaceous 

 period." In 1855, Dr. Hooker read a paper before the Geological 

 Society of London, " On some Small Seed-vessels (Folliculites minu- 

 tulus) from the Bovey Tracey Coal," which was the first announce- 

 ment of the. discovery of identifiable fossils in the deposit. Besides 

 the fossil just named, Dr. Hooker described a cone of the Scotch fir, 

 Pinus sylvestris, said to have been found in one of the uppermost beds 

 of lignite, and from it he came to the provisional conclusion that the 



