1892. | Briefer Articles. 223 
BRIEFER-ARTICEERS, 
Living fossils.—The great flat slab on which we stood seemed built 
there to command a view of stoneworts. 
In the clear lime water of Fall River, S. D., floated great streamers of 
Chara, fresh and green, yet fading insensibly, first into a dingy, then 
into a dead looking, and even into a stony mass, as the eye followed it 
upstream. It was astreamer of living, growing stoneworts that blended 
into the slabs of “petrified moss” strewn broadcast in the channel around 
us, and on one of which we stood. 
But the eye could trace this so-called living fossil or petrifaction 
back still further to the banks overhead, where other stoneworts once 
floated in waters whose channel was higher than and broader than now. 
Yet higher still, in an earlier channel, the eye could see great slabs of 
it, upturned in a railroad cutting. 
_ At our feet, where interposing boulders had reduced the transport- 
ing power of the current, a sand bar of broken stems, leaves, and 
whorls was lying, simply waiting for the “lapidifying juices” to cement 
into limestone—a sort of puzzling Chara breccia. 
Right here in reach then were all the terms of a botanico-geological 
stonewort series, a sort of climax, beginning with the perishable, grow- 
oo vapee and capped by the same built into everlasting rocks and 
ands, 
; It only remained for the collector to make his choice, which was 
one, 
fell to pieces, being encrusted just enough to appear stiff and stone-like, 
yet not enough to last. However, slabs of the “petrified moss” of any 
desired linear dimensions could be had, and handled with impunity. 
ese ever forming stonewort slabs consisted of a few inches of rigid 
lithified creek bed, as a stable sort of backing to the stony mat of weeds 
Upon them. 
