280 



Dr. Woodward thus describes a specimen in his collection* : " A 

 piece of wood having manifest marks of its having been charred, or 

 burned by the fire, before it was buried in the earth. It is not 

 unusual to meet with wood, thus burned, reposited in the bowels of 

 the earth/' 



In the copper mines of the Ryphean mountains, in Siberia, and 

 in the neighbourhood also of Cazan, the copper is found united 

 with blend, sand, and wood, forming a hard and compact mass. 

 The vegetable parts are so brittle as to be easily detached ; the 

 wood being black, resembling a charcoal -f. 



The Abbe Fortis relates, that in Luzzane, on the side of the bed 

 of the torrent called Gipalova Vrilo, he found the roots and trunk 

 of a tree, three feet in circumference, reduced to a fossil coal. The 

 particularity by which this coal trunk was distinguished, was its 

 having been cut, little more than a foot above the root, by a hatchet, 

 or some other similar instrument before the marine strata covered it. 

 I leave, the Abbe says, to those who are more knowing than myself, 

 to decide by how ancient a hatchet this tree has been cut, and in 

 what times those lands have been covered by the waters of a sea 

 now far from us, and which has left behind it a prodigious quantity 

 of exotic testacei. In the accompanying gravel are heavy pieces 

 of lava, sometimes black and sometimes grey, fossil coal, and bi- 

 tuminous scissile earth. 



Mr. Cramer, Counsellor of Mines at Altenkirchen, in the second 

 volume of Der Gesellschaft Naturforschenda Freunde zu Berlin Neue 

 Schriften, relates, that in the county of Wachtersbach, in the princi- 

 pality of Isenberg-Birstein, under the exterior crust, there first occurs 

 a strong stratum of white and red sand-stone, in alternate order, 



* Catalogue of English Fossils, part h. p. 19. 



t Voyage en Siberie, en 1761, par Mons. 1' Abbe" Chapped' Auteroche, tome i. partie ii. 

 p. 671. 



