THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 29 



NOTES ON FOSSIL SILURIAN PLANTS, 

 HAMILTON, ONT. 



Read before the Hamilton Association, October Sth, i8gi. 



BY COL. C. C. GRANT. 



As a general rule the fossil plants called fucoids of Silurian 

 seas have attracted little attention. I suppose it arises from their 

 being so seldom found even in a tolerable state of preservation. 

 Many of them on this continent are concealed in the interior of the 

 flags or limestone layers, and consequently are not calculated to 

 attract attention. Accident rarely reveals the Buthotrephis of Hall 

 in the inside of a Clinton slab. On one occasion I noted that a 

 large projecting flag, which I was unable to reach, had at last given 

 way through the action of frost on the underlying shales. The true 

 Medina freestones below, as well as the " passage beds " of Dr. 

 Spencer, had been previously quarried out and removed, leaving a 

 perpendicular cliif on a small scale. Now it so happened that a hard 

 block of an upper layer had lodged at the foot underneath, before its 

 final plunge downwards. This it evidently struck edgewise. The 

 result was the splitting of the flagstone, laying open a portion of the 

 plant remains, or rather impressions,' now contained in one of our 

 side cases. Such a thing as this cannot often occur. 



Buthotrephis, a Silurian fucoid, was named and described by 

 the world-renowned palaeontologist, Dr. Jas. Hall, of Albany, now 

 Director General of the New York State Geological Survey, as 

 occurring in the rocks in the United States, which are known to 

 us Canadians now as Cambro-Silurians. The conical root, a portion 

 of the main stem and a branch, were figured and described very 

 accurately in an early report of the New York State Survey But I 

 am not surprised that its claim to the title of a sea plant should be 

 disputed at the earliest stage of its discovery, when only a short 

 time since Dr. Nicholson, in the Palaeontology of Ontario, remarked 

 that Palaeophycus Buthotrephis of Hall and Licrophycus of Billings 

 belonged to a singular and obscure group of fossils which he indexed 

 under the head Incertcx Sedis. 



