Letters of Mr. Brongniart^ with remarks. 221 



can procure others for me. It will be very interesting to 

 obtain a suite of all the fossil organized bodies which are 

 found in the bituminous formation of Westfield ; I am in- 

 chned to think for instance, that impressions of genuine ferns 

 will be found there ; it is a thing to be verified by farther 

 observations." 



Unhappily for science, the research which led to the dis- 

 covery of the impressions offish, alluded to by M. Brongn- 

 iart, has been abandoned. There is no doubt however, 

 that the specimens were genuine. 



The person who brought them, obtained them at the depth 

 of about 40 feet, while exploring for coal, four miles west 

 of Middletown : he brought his chaise box full of them to 

 New-Haven ; he had probably never heard of the fish of Mans- 

 field and Hesse, nor had he any theories, of any kind, to 

 serve ; his single object being the discovery of coal for pur- 

 poses of profit. It is remarkable that the coincidence 

 which struck Mr. Brongniart so powerfully, and in which he 

 looked for the additional, although adventitious fact of the 

 existence of copper, holds, perfectly, even in that particular. 

 The great formation of which the Westfield locality is a por- 

 tion, may be denominated the trap formation of New England. 

 Except on the south where it touches the sea at New-Haven, 

 it is bounded all around by primitive country. It extends 

 more than one hundred miles from the sea coast into the 

 interior, and varies in width from three or four to twenty- 

 five miles ; rtdges of columnar green-stone trap, stretching 

 generally from north to south, in the direction of the length 

 of the formation, and sometimes attaining the height of seven 

 or eight hundred feet, constitute the most prominent feature ; 

 they repose on a sand-stone rock — (considered by Mr. Ma- 

 clure as the old red sand-stone) formed by the ruins of 

 primitive rocks sometimes unseparated, and varying in its 

 composition from a pudding or breccia with very large frag- 

 ments, to a fine grained sand-stone, and this in its turn pass- 

 es into an argillaceous sand-stone, and in some places into 

 slaty clay. Beneath the sand-stone rock, lie slaty rocks 

 (we mean argillaceous schist or thonschicfer) of various 

 qualities, often divided by thin veins of coal and jet, im- 

 pressed with what appear to be reeds and other elongated 

 vegetables, and frequently the rock is, throughout, so bitu- 

 minous as to burn on the fire. It was in such strata as 



