83 

 Notices, Botanical and Ornithological. By James Hardy. 



I.— BOTANICAL. 



1. On some knobs at the roots of an Equisetum. — In a 

 recent part of the Club's Transactions, I called attention to 

 some excrescences, black without and white and fleshy within, 

 and about the size of a hazel nut, attached to the roots of an 

 Equisetum, in a section of one of the clayey banks of the 

 Common burn, in the Cheviots. In May, 1869, 1 was enabled 

 to trace these to Equisetum arvense. They are probably 

 reservoirs of nutriment in a soil subject to drought, as 

 although backed by a marsh this clay is during summer, 

 being based on a rock with intervening streaks of gravel. 



In searching for them, as yet unsuccessfully, in other 

 sections of clay, I have been struck with the resemblance 

 between these dark Equisetum roots, as well as the close 

 net-work woven in clay by those of the common bracken, 

 to fossils of the coal formation. Another similarity of the 

 kind is presented by the kelp sea-weeds, when spread for 

 manure on clayey soil. They do not rapidly waste and 

 disappear like the Tangles and Floridese, but are ploughed 

 up, not greatly altered after lying a year imbedded in the 

 pale coloured clay, having all the black, broken appearance 

 seen in a slab inlaid with fossils. May not one hence infer, 

 that the original colour of many fossil plants was peculiarly 

 lurid ? and that it is owing to this as much as the effects of 

 carbonization, that so many fossil vegetables are inky hued ? 

 in other words, that the coal formation, even in its infancy, 

 was as now — a " region of horror " and of " doleful shades." 



2. Floating Sea-borne Reeds, fyc. — In the winter months 

 (December, January) long streams of broken reeds, bull- 

 rushes, and stalks of reed-mace, mingled with remains of land 

 plants, are drifted by the sea upon several parts of the 

 Berwickshire coast. There are certain landing places where 

 most of this light freight gets embayed, to remain and fritter 

 away during the summer ; where if it were to be silted up, 

 and a section afterwards laid bare, the false appearance of a 

 local lacustrine deposit would be presented ; whereas it is 

 wholly marine, and the plants that would compose it had 

 grown in lakes and marshes traversed by the Tay and other 

 Highland rivers, many leagues across the sea. Estuaries are 

 thus in the condition of land-locked lakes, the waves and 

 currents intermix the productions of opposite shores. 



