VOL. LXXXIX.] PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 43 1 



the mouth of the Humber ; and it is a remarkable circumstance, that in the large 

 tracts of low lands which lie on the south banks of that river, a little above its 

 mouth, there is a subterraneous stratum of decayed trees and shrubs, exactly like 

 those we observed at Sutton ; particularly at Axholme isle, a tract of 10 miles in 

 length, by 5 in breadth ; and at Hatfield chase, which comprehends 180,000 acres. 

 Dugdale* had long ago made this observation, in the first of these places ; and De 

 la Pry me *}- in the second. The roots are there likewise standing in the places 

 where they grew ; the trunks lie prostrate. The woods are of the same species as 

 at Sutton. Roots of aquatic plants and reeds are likewise mixed with them ; and 

 they are covered by a stratum of some yards of soil, the thickness of which, though 

 not ascertained with exactness by the above-mentioned observers, we may easily 

 conceive to correspond with that which covers the stratum of decayed wood at Sut- 

 ton, by the circumstance of the roots being according to Mr. Richardson's obser- 

 vations^ only visible when the water is low, where a channel was cut, which has 

 left them uncovered. f 



Little doubt can be entertained of the moory islets of Sutton being a part of this 

 extensive subterraneous stratum, which, by some inroad of the sea, has been there 

 stripped of its covering of soil. The identity of the levels ; that of the* species of 

 trees ; the roots of these affixed, in both, to the soil where they grew; and, above 

 all, the flattened shape of the trunks, branches, and roots, found in the islets, 

 which can only be accounted for by the heavy pressure of a superinduced stratum, 

 are sufficient reasons for this opinion. Such a wide spread assemblage of vegetable 

 ruins, lying almost in the same level, and that level generally under the common 

 mark of low water, must naturally strike the observer, and give birth to the follow- 

 ing questions. 1. What is the epoch of this destruction ? 2. By what agencv was 

 it effected ? In answer to these questions, I will venture to submit the following 

 reflections. 



The fossil remains of vegetables hitherto dug up in so many parts of the globe, 

 are, on a close inspection, found to belong to 2 very different states of our planet. 

 The parts of vegetables, and their impressions, found in mountains of a cotaceous, 

 schistous, or even sometimes of a calcareous nature, are chiefly of plants now exist- 

 ing between the tropics, which could neither have grown in the latitudes in which 

 they are dug up, nor have been carried and deposited there by any of the acting 

 forces under the present constitution of nature. The formation indeed of the very 

 mountains in which they are buried, and the nature and disposition of the materials 

 which compose them, are such as we cannot account for by any of the actions and 

 re-actions which, in the actual state of things, take place on the surface of the 

 earth. We must necessarily recur to that period in the history of our planet, when 

 the surface of the ocean was at least so much above its present level, as to cover 



* History of Embanking and Draining. Chap. 27. f Philos. Trans, vol. 22, p. 980. 



X Philos. Trans, vol. 19, p. 528.— Orig. 



VOL. XVIII. 3 Q 



