80 TRIASSIC FISHES AND PLANTS. 
No real plant-beds have been found in the northern Triassic areas, and 
all the remains of plants yet met with seem to be floated fragments, that here 
and there sank to the bottom of the basin and were buried in the accumu- | 
lating sediments. In the sandstones, which were transported by rapid cur- 
rents or were formed by shore waves, delicate plants and the foliary ap- 
pendages of trees would naturally be triturated and destroyed, and in the 
quarries from which building stone is taken at Newark stems and branches, 
with an occasional cone, are all the plant remains that have survived the 
rough treatment which they have received. These are, however, so numer- 
ous in some of the layers, that they prove the former existence of land cov- 
ered with vegetation at no great distance 
At Milford, N. J., the plants are more numerous and somewhat better 
preserved. There we find the stems of Equisetum and Schizoneura, with 
many twigs and some cones of conifers. The Equiseta not unfrequently 
show the diaphragms which partitioned off the stems at the joints, and, with 
other things, we sometimes meet with disks or flattened cones of which 
the surface is radiately striate and which have considerable resemblance to 
some of the woody fungi, Polyporus, ete. These I have supposed may 
have been the diaphragms of Hquisetum Rogersi, but they are not sufficiently 
well preserved to justify any positive assertion in regard to their botanical 
relations. 
At Durham, Conn., the fronds of cyeads and ferns are not uncommon, 
and one specimen obtained by Mr. Loper shows a number of fronds of 
Otozamites radiating from what seems to have been the summit of a stem. 
The fern fronds, too, are grouped in such a way as to illustrate the radiate 
arrangement of the pinnee in Clathropteris. 
The quantity of carbonaceous matter in the shales here is large, and is 
so generally diffused that we must conclude it was largely derived from the 
decomposition of plant tissue. This indicates the proximity of a consider- 
able amount of growing vegetation at the time of the deposition of the 
shales, and it is possible that somewhere near this locality plant-beds will 
be found which will afford a better view of this vegetation. 
In the Portiand quarries casts of the trunks and branches of trees are 
not unfrequently met with, but they are always imperfectly preserved, and 
