122 DESCRIPTION OF THE STRATA. 



together. The block being split, in the presence of a bishop who 

 lived at that place, there appeared in a cavity within it, to the astonish- 

 ment of the beholders, a live toad, having a chain of gold round his 

 neck ! He had not also a crown on his head, but being regarded, 

 it would seem, as the monarch of the quarry, his little dusky 

 majesty was, by order of the bishop, again shut up in his narrow 

 palace ; and this being replaced in the centre of his territory, wa» 

 deeply covered up with i-ubbish, that no sacrilegious hand might violate 

 his sacred person, or despoil him of his royal ornaments. 



In a marginal note on this passage of Newburgh, in the Antwerp 

 edition of 1567, it is stated by the writer of the note, C. Lang, that 

 in the coal pits of his country, in the vicinity of Leeds, it was very 

 common to find large round nodules, smooth and very hard, contain- 

 ing live toads, in cavities in their centre, which had no visible com- 

 munication with the exterior part of the stone. — About 8 or 10 years 

 ago, a live toad was found in the grey limestone, in the quarry 

 formerly mentioned, on the side of the York road, a little to the 

 south of Malton. One of the most recent examples of this kind was 

 observed about a year ago, in a coal pit in the county of Durham. 



It is no easy matter to account for a phenomenon of this descrip- 

 tion ; for whether we suppose that the animal is coeval with the rock 

 which incloses it, or that the spawn which produced it has been 

 conveyed by water through some narrow channel or pore, into the 

 cavity where it is found in a state of maturity, we are involved in 

 difficulties which cannot be very easily solved. 



Many of our sandstone beds contain petrified wood. Fragments 

 of charcoal, and even large branches of trees in the state of charcoal, 

 are still more frequent. In some places we find in the sandstone, 

 patches of real coal, but of a finer grain than the coal that occurs in 

 seams, approaching more to jet, butnot possessing its solidity, nor its 

 conchoidal fracture. Real jet has also been discovered in the same 



