104 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 



These black fakes, when crushed and washed, resolve them- 

 selves into vegetable debris, consisting of carbonised wood, 

 compressed stems of plants, large oblong or lanceolate sacs 

 flattened into mere films, and a few spores. They also con- 

 tain a considerable number of pieces of Scorpion and Euryp- 

 terid skin. 



At Hailes Quarry the whole 200 or 300 feet of sandstone 

 is divided into thin beds by the partings of clay or black 

 films of carbonaceous matter ; and sometimes these layers are 

 made up entirely of alternations of black and white fakes 

 only a line or two in thickness. These black fakes being 

 composed of vegetable cUhris, the sandstone of Hailes Quarry 

 must represent a long period of deposition of sand in some 

 quiet lake, into which the winds and streams frequently carried 

 the lighter vegetation of the land, which was deposited as 

 drift wrack along with the falling sediment. 



Incidental Organic Contents. — Besides macrospores and 

 microspores, many other organisms were discovered while 

 examining shales and coals. The most numerous were of vege- 

 table nature. Pinnules of ferns frequently occurred com- 

 pletely " mummified " — that is, with the ordinary blackness 

 bleached from them, simply leaving a colourless or light 

 brown tissue, in which occasionally the cell structure is pre- 

 served. Sometimes portions of fern fronds in circinate verna- 

 tion were met with. The most numerous remains, however, 

 were the stems of plants. They were often striped in darker 

 and lighter longitudinal bands, and they were sometimes 

 transversely barred. In some of the fragments pores occurred 

 irregularly scattered among the cellular tissue, which were 

 probably the stomata. The next most abundant vegetable 

 forms were oblong-lanceolate or oval sacs, which most pro- 

 bably are empty sporangia, as some examples appear to 

 contain a few microspores. These sacs are generally of a 

 reddish-brown or chocolate colour, and translucent, but some- 

 times they are quite opaque, and composed of carbon. They 

 are almost always associated with the spores in greater or 

 less numbers. 



Carbonised wood was common in all the poor or shale-like 

 coals, the vertical rows of cells being visible in every case. 



