Sir William Edmond Logan. 83 



showing that the underclaj was the soil in which the plants 

 grew which were afterwards converted into coal. Of the 100 

 thick and thin coal-seams in the South Wales coal-field, he 

 found that not a single one was without an underclay, and the 

 inference appeared to be that there was some essential connec- 

 tion between the production of the one and the existence of the 

 other. "To account," said he, "for the unfailing combination 

 by drift, seems an unsatisfactory hypothesis ; but whatever may 

 be the mutual dependence of the phenomena, they give us rea- 

 sonable grounds to suppose that in the Stigmaria ficoides we 

 have the plant to which the earth is mainly indebted for those 

 vast stores of fossil fuel which are now so indispensable to the 

 comfort and prosperity of its inhabitants." 



So much did he become interested in this subject that in the 

 following year (1841) he crossed to America, and visited the 

 coal-fields of Pennsylvania and Nova Scotia, in order to ascer- 

 tain whether the same conditions existed there. Such he found 

 to be the case ; and in the following spring he read an interest- 

 ing paper before the Geological Society, the object of which, to 

 use his own words, "was to state the occurrence immediately 

 below the coal-seams of America of the same Stigmaria beds as 

 had been observed below those of South Wales, and to show 

 the importance of this prevailing fact." Shortly after his re- 

 turn from America, he also visited coal-seams in the neighbor- 

 hood of Falkirk, Scotland, there too, finding the St'gmaria clays 

 beneath the coal. 



It was during his visit to Nova Scotia, in 1841, that he dis- 

 covered in the Lower Coal-measures of Horton Bluff the foot- 

 prints of a reptilian animal — a discovery which, perhaps, failed 

 to attract as much attention as it deserved, although it was the 

 first instance in which any trace of reptiles had been detected 

 as low down in the geological scale as the Carboniferous. The 

 winter of 1841-42 was also spent in Canada, and the facts were 

 obtained for a paper on the packing of ice in the St. Lawrence, 

 which was subsequently read before the Geological Society of 

 London. 



Such, briefly, was the career of Logan previous to his ap- 

 pointment as' Director of the Geological Survey of Canada. 

 Already he had acquired a reputation in Britain as a geologist, 

 and had given himself the best of trainings for the work upon 

 which he was about to enter on this side of the Atlantic. But 

 what was meantime passing in Canada? * * * * 



"In July, 1841, in the first United Parliament, a petition 

 from the Natural History Society of Montreal, praying for aid 

 to carry out a systematic geological survey of the Province, 

 was presented by Mr. B. Holmes. It was "referred to a select 

 committee consisting of Messrs. Holmes, Neilson, Quesnel, Mer- 



