TROPICAL FRUITS IN SHEPPEY. 389 



Although all these fruits belong to Genera whose leaves 

 are pinnated, no fossil pinnated Palm leaves (as we have 

 just stated,) have yet been found in Europe. It seems there- 

 fore most likely, from the mode in which so large a number 

 of miscellaneous fruits are crowded together in the Isle of 

 Sheppey, mixed with marine shells and fragments of timber, 

 almost always perforated by Teredines, that the fruits in 

 question were drifted by marine currents from a warmer 

 climate than that which Europe presented after the com- 

 mencement of the Tertiary Epoch; in the same manner as- 

 tropical seeds and logs of mahogany are now drifted from 

 the Gulf of Mexico to the Coasts of Norway and Ireland. 



Besides the fruits of Palms, the Isle of Sheppey presents 

 an assemblage of many hundred species of other fruits,* 

 most of them apparently tropical; these could scarcely have 

 been accumulated, as they are, without a single leaf of the 

 tree on which they gi'ew, and have been associated with 

 drifted timber bored by Teredines, by any other means than 

 a sea-current. 



We have no decisive information as to the number of spe- 

 cies of these fossil fruits ; they have been estimated at from 

 six to seven hundred.f In the same clay with them are 

 found great numbers of fossil Crustaceans, and also the re- 

 mains of many fishes, and of Crocodiles, and aquatic Tor- 

 toises. 



* According' to H. Ad. Brongniart, many of these have near relation to 

 the aromatic fruits of the Amomum (cardamom,) they are triangular, much 

 compressed, and umbilicated at the summit, which presents a small circular 

 areola, apparently the cicatrix of an adherent calyx; within are three valves. 

 A sligiit furrow passes along the middle of each plain surface, similar to that 

 on the fruit of many scitamineous plants. These Sheppey fruits, however, 

 cannot be identified with any known Genus of that Family, but approach so 

 nearly to it, that Ad. Brongniart gives them the name of Amomocarpum. 



■\ See Parkinson's Organic Remains, Vol. i. Pi. 6, 7. Jacob's Flora Fa- 

 vershamensis. And Dr. Parsons, in Phil. Trans. Lond. 1757, Vol. 50, page 

 S96, Pi. XV. XVI. A collection of these fruits is preserved in the British 

 Museum, another in the Museum at Canterbury, and a third in that of Mr. 

 Bowerbank, in London. 



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