1855.] 



BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE. 



365 



of the Scriptures, they would find it coincide on every important 

 point. The excavations at Chaldea furnished them with inscriptions 

 showing the names of liings, their parentage, the gods they worshipped, 

 the temples they built, the cities they founded, and many other parti- 

 culars of their reign. He then mentioned some circumstances with 

 reference to the mound at Birs-Nimroud, which he had recently 

 uncovered, and which he found laid out in the form of seven terraces. 

 These were arranged in the order in which the Caldeans or Sabeans 

 supposed the planetary spheres were arranged, and each terrace being 

 painted in different colours, in order to I'epresent its respective planet. 

 Another curious circumstance with reference to this excavation was 

 the discovery of documents enclosed in this temple. From the appear- 

 ance of the pl.ace, he was enabled at once to say in what part they 

 were placed, and on opening the wall at the place he indicated, his 

 workmen found two fine cj'linders. He also mentioned another small 

 ivory cylinder which he had discovered, .and round which were 

 engraved mathematical figures, so small that they could hardly be seen 

 with the naked eye, and which could not have been engraved without 

 the aid of a very strong lens. In concluding, he said that before the 

 British Association met nest year, he hoped to be able to bring before 

 them the decipherment of severjil highly important inscriptions. 



On the less-known Fossil Floras of Scolland, by Mr. Hugh JIiller. 

 — Scotland has its four fossil Floras : its Flora of the Old Ked Sand- 

 stone, its carboniferous Flora, its oolitic Flora, and that Flora of ap- 

 parently tertiary age, of which His Grace the Duke of Argyll found 

 so interesting a fragment, overflown by the thick basalt beds and trap 

 tuffs of Mull. Of these, the only one adequately known to the geolo- 

 gist is the gorgeous Flora of the coal-measures, probably the richest, 

 in at least individual plants, which the world has yet seen. The others 

 are all but wholly unknown ; and the Association may be the more 

 disposed to tolerate the comparative meagreness of the few brief re- 

 marks which I propose making on two of tlieir number — the Floras of 

 the Old Red Sandstone and the oolite — from the consideration that 

 the meagreness is only too truly representative of the present state of 

 our knowledge reg.arding them, and that if my descriptions be scanty 

 .and inadequ.ate, it is only because the facts are still few. How much 

 of the lost may vet be recovered I know not ; but the circumstances 

 that two great Floras — remote predecessors of the existing one — that 

 once covered with their continuous mantle of green the dry land of 

 what is now Scotland, should be represented but by a few coniferous 

 fossils, a few cycadaceous fronds, a few ferns and club mosses, must 

 serve to show what mere fragments of the past history of our country 

 we have yet been able to recover from the rocks, and how very much 

 in the work of exploration and discovery still remains for us to do. 

 We stand on the further edge of the great Floras of by-past creations, 

 and have gathered but a few handfuls of faded leaves, a few broken 

 branches, a few decayed cones. The Silurian deposits of our country 

 have not yet furnished us with any unequivocal ti'aces of a terrestrial 

 vegetation. Prof. Nicol, of Aberdeen, on subjecting to the microscope 

 the ashes of a Silurian anthracite which occurs in Peebles-shire, de- 

 tected iu it minute tubular fibres, which seem, he says, to indicate a 

 higher class of vegetation than the algaj ; but these may have belonged 

 to a marine vegetation notwithstanding. Associated with the earliest 

 ichthysic remains of the Old Red Sandstone, we find vegetable orga- 

 nisms iu such abundance, that they communicate often a fissile cha- 

 racter to the stone in which they occur. But, existing as mere carbon- 

 aceous markings, their state of keeping is usually so bad, that they 

 tell us little else than that the autiquely-formed fishes of this remote 

 period had swam over sea-bottoms darkened by forests of algic. The 

 immensely developed tiagstoues of Caithness seem to owe their dark 

 colour to organic matter, mainly of vegetable origin. So strongly 

 bituminous, indeed, are some of the beds of dingier tint, that they 

 flame in the fire like slates steeped in oil. The remains of terrestrial 

 vegetation in this deposite are greatly scantier than those of its marine 

 Flora ; but they must be regarded as possessing a peculiar interest, 

 as the oldest of their class in, at least, the British Isl.and.s, whose true 

 place in the scale can be satisfactorily established. In the flagstones 

 of Orkney there occurs, though very rarely, a minute vegetable orga- 

 nism, which I have elsewhere described as having much the appearance 

 of one of our smaller ferns, such as tlie maidenhair spleenwort or 

 dwarf moonwort. But the vegetable organism of the formation, indi- 

 cative of the highest rank of any yet found in it, is a true wood of the 

 cone-bearing order. I laid open the nodule which contains this speci- 

 men, in one of the ichthyolite beds of Cromarty, rather more than 

 eighteen years ago ; but, tliough I described it, in the first edition of 

 a little work on ' The Old Red Sandstone' in 1S41, as exhibiting the 

 woody fibre, it was not until 184.3 that, with the assistance of the op- 



tical lapidary, I subjected its structure to the test of the microscope. 

 It turned out, as 1 anticipated, to be the portion of a tree ; and on 

 my submitting the prepared specimen to one of our highest authorities, 

 the late Mr. William Nicol, he at once decided that the "reticulated 

 texture of the transverse section, though somewhat compressed, clearly 

 indicated a coniferous origin." I may add, that this most ancient of 

 Scottish lignites presented several pecuUarities of structure. Like 

 some of the jVi-aucarians of the warmer latitudes, it exhibits no lines 

 of yearly growth : its medullary rays are slender, and comparatively 

 inconspicuous ; and the discs which mottle the sides of its sap cham- 

 bers, when viewed in the longitudinal section, are exceedingly minute, 

 and are ranged, so far as can be judged in their imperfect state of 

 keeping, in the alternate order peculiar to the Araucarians. On what 

 perished land of the early PaUeozoic ages did this venerably antique 

 tree cast root and flourish, when the extinct genera Ptcrichthys and 

 Coccosteous were enjoying life by millions in the surrounding seas — 

 long ere the Flora or Fauna of the coal measures had begun to be ? 

 The Caithness flagstones have furnished one vegetable organism ap- 

 parently higher in the scale than those just described, in a well- 

 marked specimen of Lepidodendron, which exhibits, like the Arauca- 

 carian of the Lower Old Red, though less distinctly, the internal struc- 

 ture. It was found about sixteen years ago in a pavement quarry 

 near Clockbriggs — the last station on the Aberdeen and Forfar rail- 

 way — as the traveller approaches the latter place from the north. 

 Above this grey flagstone formation lies the Upper Old Red Sandstone, 

 with its peculiar group of ichthyic organisms, none of which seem spe- 

 cifically identical with those of either the Caithness or the Forfarshire 

 beds ; for it is an interesting circumstance, suggestive sui-ely of the 

 vast periods which must have elapsed during its deposition, that the 

 great Old Red system had its three distinct platforms of organic exis- 

 tence, each wholly diflerent from the others. Generically and in the 

 group, however, the Upper fishes much more closely resemble the 

 fishes of the Lower, or Caithness and Cromarty platlorm, than they 

 do those of the Forfarshire and Kincardine one. In the uppermost 

 beds of the Upper Old Red formation in Scotland, which are usually of 

 a pale or light yellow colour, the vegetable remains again become 

 strongly carbonaceous, but their state of preservation continues bad — 

 too bad to admit of their determination of either species or genera ; 

 and not until we rise a very little beyond the system do we find the 

 remains of a Flora either rich or weU preserved. But very remarkable 

 is the change which at this stage at once occurs. We pass at a single 

 stride from great poverty to great wealth. The suddenness of the 

 change seems suited to remind one of that experienced by the voyager 

 when, after traversing for many days some wide expanse of ocean, 

 unvaried save by its banks of floating sea-weed, or where, occasionally 

 and at wide intervals, he picks up some leaf-bearing bough, or marks 

 some fragment of drift-weed go floating past, he enters at length the 

 sheltered lagoon of some coral island, and sees aU around the deep 

 green of a tropical vegetation descending in tangled luxuriance to the 

 water's edge — tall, erect ferns, and creeping Lycapodacea; ; and the 

 pandanus, with its aerial roots and its screw-like clusters of narrow 

 leaves; and high over all, tall palms, with their huge pinnate fronds, 

 and their curiously aggregated groups of massive fruit. In this noble 

 Flora of the coal-measures much still remains to be done in Scotland. 

 Our Lower Carboniferous rocks are of immense development; the 

 limestones of Bui-die House, with their numerous terrestrial plants, 

 occur many hundred feet beneath our mountain limestones; and our 

 list of vegetable species peculiar to these lower deposits is still very 

 incomplete. Even in those higher carboniferous rocks with which the 

 many coal workings of the country have rendered us comparatively 

 familiar, there seems to bo still a good deal of the new and the un- 

 known to repay the labour of future explorers. It was oidy last year 

 that Mr. Gourlie, of this city, added to our fossil Flora a new Volk- 

 mannia from the coal-field of Carluke : and I detected very recently 

 iu a neighbouring locality, though in but an inJifl'erent state of keep- 

 ing, what seems to be a new and very peculiar fern. There is u Stig- 

 maria. too, on tlie table, very ornate in its sculpture, of which I have 

 now found three specimens in a quan'v of the coal-measures near 

 Portobello, that has still to be figured and described. In this richly- 

 ornamented Stignmria the characteristic orcohe present the ordinary 

 aspect; each, however, forms the centre of a sculptured star, consist- 

 ing of from eighteen to twenty rays, or rather the centre of a sculptured 

 flower of the Composite order, resembling a garden dai.^y. Tlie minute 

 petals — if we arc to accept the latter comparison — arc ranged in three 

 concentric lines, and their form is irregularly lenticular. Even among 

 the vegetable organisms already partially described and figured, much 

 remains to be accomplished in the way of restoration. The dettiched 



