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some disputes of a part of the society with the publisher of the 

 work, he providently resolved to transmit an abridged copy of his 

 last paper to the Royal Society of London, who did him the justice 

 to publish it in their Transactions. In the same volume, were 

 communicated to the public, the remarks on the Bovey Coal, by 

 Dr. Jeremiah Milles, which I have already so fully noticed ; and in 

 this paper the opinion of Professor Hollman, respecting the na- 

 ture of this fossil wood, was, as you have seen, disputed, and its mi- 

 neral origin asserted. The Professor, however, thoroughly convinced 

 of the propriety of the opinion he had adopted, sent a paper which 

 he supposed would confirm the arguments he had employed in his 

 former paper ; but in consequence, as the Professor supposes, of its 

 not coming to hand, this paper was never, in any way, noticed. 

 When he republished his two first papers, at Gottingen, in the year 

 1784, he, therefore, joined to them two additional papers: one of 

 which was the paper which had been sent for, but had not appeared 

 in, the Philosophical Transactions; and in which he fully evinced the 

 truth and propriety of his former observations ; and the other con- 

 tained some very judicious remarks on the hypothesis of the gra- 

 dual change of a cretaceous earth into wood, which had been ad- 

 vanced by Stelluti ; and by which Dr. Milles had endeavoured to 

 support his hypothesis of the mineral origin of this fossil wood. 



Thus was the first and complete copy of this author's ingenious 

 paper, on this subject, kept for nearly twenty years from the 

 eye of the public ; and the abridged copy, governed by a fate 

 not less severe, made its appearance, under the most unfavourable 

 auspices ; since, being published in the same volume of the Philo- 

 sophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London which con- 

 tained a very laboured attempt at refutation of the very opinion he 

 had adopted, it appears to have obtained but little notice. The 

 answer to Dr. Milles's paper, not appearing in the Philosophical 

 Transactions, it seemed that the Professor, subdued by his superior 



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