Notice on Vegetable Fossils. 267 
» It has been long known that the deposits of Fossil coal 
are accompanied by large quantities of vegetable remains : 
it was alsolong ago observed, that plants having a strong re- 
semblance to our ferns, and the stalks of other plants, unlike 
any that are now known to exist, were most common in 
those regions ; but it is not a long time since it was first re- 
marked that the entire system of those vegetable remains 
was different from the entire system of vegetable remains 
which are found in the more recent strata of the earth; and 
it was not known until within a few years that these remains 
were not always laid down in the fissures, or on the surface 
of the layers, and parallel to their stratification, but that in 
some places they intersected those layers, passing through 
several of them, being sometimes perpendicular to them, and 
sometimes in a vertical position, natural to all phaneroga- 
mous plants. 
Most assuredly, if these notions had been more general, 
ifthe facts which confirm them had not been considered as 
exceptions due to chance, we should not have seen inrecent 
periods, theories proposed on the formation of coal, which 
theories are in evident contradiction with these facts. 
The vertical stalks which we are about to describe, have 
already been noticed by Mr. de Gallois; they are seen in 
the most distinct manner at the Mine of Treuil, at 1000 
metres (1094 yards,) north of the city of St. Etienne, in the 
department of the Loire. 
This coal mine unites two circumstances very rare, and 
at the same time highly advantageous for observation, the 
strata are almost perfectly horizontal, and the mine is so sit- 
uated that it is worked wholly open from above, in the usu- 
al manner of working quarries; in this manner an opportu- 
nity is offered of observing a natural and complete section 
of the different rocks and minerals which compose the su- 
perstructure, and of representing them with a degree of 
clearness, and throughout an extent that is wholly impossi- 
ble where mines are wrought by subterranean galleries. 
This natural section of the ground is highly interesting, 
not only from the circumstance of the Vegetable Fossils, 
that form the principal object of the present notice ; but also 
from the presence of compact carbonate of iron, so constant- 
ly found to accompany coal, and which will soon becomein - 
France, as it has long been in England, a source of great 
