Transverse Sections of Carboniferous Wood. 359 
XXIX. Remarks on Two Transverse Sections of Carboniferous 
Wood from Baberton New Quarry, Midlothian. By 
J. BENNIE and J. A. JOHNSTON. 
(Read 21st February 1894.) 
The pieces of petrified wood from which these sections 
have been made, were found lying on the shale heaps, having 
evidently been forced out of the softly indurated sandy shale 
as it crumbled into dust under exposure to the weather. 
As it will characteristically introduce what we have to state 
regarding the quarry and the rocks in it, we may relate how 
we became acquainted with them. In course of conversation 
with Mr Samuel Hunter, builder, he told us that the sand- 
stone of this quarry was so full of fossils that the stone was 
rendered useless by them—and that shortly after it had been 
opened by the late Sir James Gowans, he had to abandon 
working it for that reason. On visiting the quarry we soon 
saw the cause of this, inasmuch as the stone, a rather coarse 
sandstone, was full of impressions or imprints of plants 
which had once existed in bodily form, but had, in time, 
rotted, and been spirited away, leaving these hollow imprints 
behind. The stone, in quarrying or being divided into 
blocks suitable for building, would split or divide more 
readily in the direction of these imprints than in any other 
direction, and of course very seldom in the way the quarrier 
or builder wanted, and so they could not get stones of the 
necessary shape or size. This leads us naturally to under- 
stand the formation of the rock. 
In early Carboniferous times there existed at the place 
we now call Baberton a lake or pool, or perhaps a wide 
reach of a river, or, say, simply a water into which a current 
flowed, carrying with it sand and mud and much drift-wood 
from the land of that time. These would be deposited very 
promiscuously in the sand and mud when it settled as 
sediment. Through time the sand set and hardened round the 
drift-wood, which would rot and pass away with the water 
which soaked through it, leaving a hollow imprint behind. 
This was the general fate of the drift-wood, but some pieces, 
through favourable circumstances, would be infiltrated by 
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