Royal Society. 173 
PROCEEDINGS OF LEARNED SOCIETIES. 
ROYAL SOCIETY. 
Nov. 21, 1861.—Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, Bart., President, in 
the Chair. 
“The Lignites and Clays of Bovey Tracey, Devonshire.’ By 
William Pengelly, Esq., F.G.S. 
The village of Bovey Tracey, in Devonshire, is situated on the left 
bank of the river Bovey, a small tributary of the Teign, about eleven 
miles south-westerly from Exeter. A considerable plain stretches 
away from it, for about nine miles, in a south-easterly direction, and 
terminates three and a half miles north-west of Torquay. It appears 
a lake-like expansion of the valleys of the Bovey and Teign, and is 
surrounded on all sides by lofty hills of granite and other rocks, 
Excavations in various parts of this plain, especially in the north- 
western part of it, known as Bovey Heathfield, have disclosed, beneath 
an accumulation of gravel mixed with clay and sand, a regular series 
of strata of lignite, clay, and sand, well known to geologists as the 
‘* Bovey deposit,” whilst the lignite is equally familiar as “ Bovey 
coal.” 
The most important of the excavations is that known as the 
*Coal-pit,” whence lignite is extracted, which is used, in small 
quantities, at a neighbouring pottery, and also by the poorer cottagers 
of the immediate neighbourhood. 
The deposit has long attracted the attention of both the scientific - 
and commercial world, and many authors have given descriptions 
and speculations respecting it. 
In 1760 the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Milles sent a paper on it to the 
Royal Society. His aim appears to have been to prove the mineral 
origin of the lignite, in refutation of Professor Hollman, of Gdéttin- 
gen, who had described, and assigned a vegetable origin to, a similar 
substance found near the city of Munden. In 1794 and 1796 Dr. 
Maton described the deposit, and mentioned the existence of a large 
turf bog, near the pit, in which whole trees were often discovered, 
but “none of them bearing the least resemblance to Bovey coal.” 
In 1797 Mr. Hatchett brought the subject before the Linnean 
Society, in a paper in which his object seems to have been the refu- 
tation of the mineral theory of Dr. Milles. In his ‘ History of Exeter,’ 
published in 1802, Mr. Brice next gave an account of the deposit, 
and the state of the lignite workings ; he supposed the basin to have 
formerly been a stagnant lake or morass into which trees were suc- 
cessively transported from the neighbouring slopes. The twelfth 
letter in Parkinson’s ‘ Organic Remains,’ published in 1804, appears 
to have been written by Mr. Scammell, of Bovey Tracey, and is de- 
voted to the lignite ; from it we learn that the coal had been worked 
- upwards of ninety years, and that the trees found in the bog, men- 
tioned by Dr. Maton, were of the fir kind. Mr. Vancouver, in his 
‘General View of the Agriculture of the County of Devon,’ pub- 
