204 



turf : it is not much unlike flax : the turf holes in time grow up 

 with it again, and all the little gutters in bogs are generally filled 

 with it." 



Another circumstance, on which Dr. Anderson dwells, demands 

 a little consideration. This moss plant, he conceives, may live to an 

 indefinite age, and increase to an immense magnitude, enveloping, 

 in its progress, trees and every other matter which comes in its way ; 

 which it either consumes or preserves, according as the peculiar 

 nature of each are liable to be affected by its juices. But the 

 effects here mentioned are very different from what the appearances 

 in peat manifest. The trees- and other vegetable matter, which, for 

 argument sake, we will for a moment consider as being thus enve- 

 loped, are neither consumed, nor preserved, in the sense in which 

 these words are here employed, but actually changed into a sub- 

 stance of a different nature from, and exactly agreeing with that 

 of the surrounding matter. That any living vegetable should possess 

 chemical and physical properties essentially different from all vege- 

 table matter, which is the case with peat, and should possess the 

 power of so assimilating to its nature all vegetables it invested, as 

 to' form with them a homogeneous mass, cannot therefore, I con- 

 clude, be admitted. 



Bovey coal, that species of bituminous wood, so particularly men- 

 tioned in a former letter, as abounding so plentifully at Bovey in 

 Devonshire,, and at Munden in Germany, I must here observe to 

 you, appears to be wood more highly bituminized than fossil wood 

 is in general; and may be considered as next in progression to com- 

 plete bituminization. The fibrous structure, so evident in most of 

 its specimens, plainly evinces its ligneous origin ; and the undulated 

 and confused direction of its fibres (seen in Plate I. Fig. 2.) shews 

 that, by some process, they have been so much softened, as to have 

 admitted a distortion from their natural direction ; whilst its ; 



