240 CONCRETIONS. 



which occur hexamerous fruits, with the seeds united into a putamen. A putamen, or 

 else an envelope, as in some of the palms, could alone furnish the "hard tissue" of which 

 these fruits are almost entirely made up. 



Of the other fruits I have as yet formed no opinion, nor obtained any results worth 

 mentioning. If I should obtain any, I will let you know without delay. 



With sincerest respect, 



I remain yours very truly, 



J. W. BAILEY. 



One interesting conclusion is here hinted at by Prof. Bailey, viz., that these fruits, or 

 rather the one he was describing, are not like any of our present northern fruits, but ap- 

 proximate to those of the torrid zone, such as the Sapotaceae. This is just what we might 

 expect from the principles of geology, if the deposit is as old as the tertiary. Yet how 

 few can be made to realize that the Champlain valley once had a climate like that of the 

 West Indies ! that the western slope of the Green Mountains once formed the shore of a 

 tropical ocean, or strait rather, and that along that shore grew tropical fruits, which were 

 floated by rivers and currents into the region now called Brandon ! Yet the conclusion' 

 forces itself upon the geologist ; for even though he is unable to refer these fruits to 

 existing families, he can see that they approximate to tropical rather than northern fruits. 

 Almost all of them are mostly made up of the sclerogen or hard tissues found in one of 

 them by Prof. Bailey, and are thus allied in this respect to the palm tribe, nearly all of 

 which are inhabitants of the warmer regions of the globe. 



Leo Lesquereux,of Columbus, Ohio, one of our most accomplished botanists, writes as fol- 

 lows concerning these fruits: "I am acquainted with the Brandon fruits from specimens 

 (very few) presented to me, and especially from the excellent pages describing them in 

 the 15th vol. of Silliman's Journal. Most of the fruits published, or rather figured there, 

 can be referred to species of the upper tertiary. They agree especially with the flora of 

 Oeningen, and I have no doubt that the Brandon lignites belong to the same epoch as the 

 upper bed of the lignite of the tertiary. It is about what Prof. Hitchcock supposed in his 

 paper. Nevertheless they cannot belong to the Pliocene. There is no living species 

 among them." 



CONCRETIONS. 



Rounded masses of calcareous or silicious matter, or of hydrate of iron, occur in most 

 of the rocks, and might as well be described in this place. They vary in size from those 

 several feet in diameter, to those not larger than a millet seed, and have evidently been 

 formed after the original production of the rock. The most perfect of these nodules are 

 spherical ; but they are often flattened, and made in fact to assume a vast variety of forms, 

 some of them exceedingly singular. These bodies are called concretions, because they 

 seem evidently to have been formed by the accumulation of matter around a center, by 

 what is called molecular attraction. We have found three or four varieties of these bodies 

 in Vermont deserving Special attention, either from their nature or their forms. 



In the granite of several localities we have spherical or spheroidal concretions, chiefly 

 of black mica ; the like of which we have seen nowhere else, nor any account of them. 



