lyell's TRAVELS IN NORTH AMERICA. 395 



excellent grindstone, and about a mile further to the south, at a distance of 

 about six miles from Minudie, the first of the upright trees appears. Then 

 follows a series of coal-bearing strata, containing about nineteen seams of coal, 

 occupying a range of coast about two miles long. At low tide a horizontal sec- 

 tion of these beds is seen on the beach, and their edges in the vertical pre- 

 cipices. 



The beds through which erect trees or rather the trunks of trees placed at 

 right angles to the planes of stratification are traceable, have a thickness of 

 about 2500 feet, and no deception can arise from the repetition of the same 

 beds owing to shifts or faults, the section being unbroken, and the rocks with 

 the exception of their dip quite undisturbed. In the first of these upright trees 

 which I saw, no part of the original plant is preserved, except the bark, which 

 forms a tube of pure bituminous coal, filled with sand clay and other deposits, 

 now forming a solid internal cylinder without traces of organic structure. The 

 bark is a quarter of an inch thick, marked externally with irregular longi- 

 tudinal ridges and furrows, without leaf-scars, and therefore not resembling the 

 regular flutings of Sigillaria;, but agreeing exactly with the description of those 

 vertical trees which are found at Dixonfold, on the Bolton railway, of which 

 Messrs. Hawkshaw and Bowman have given an excellent account in the Pro- 

 ceedings of the Geological Society of London. * On comparing Mr. Hawkshaw's 

 drawings of the British fossils, in the library of the Geological Society, as well 

 as a spcimen of one of the Dixonfold trees presented by him to their museum, 

 with portions of the bark brought by me from Nova Scotia, I have no hesitation 

 in declaring them to be identical. 



The diameter of the tree was 14 inches at the top and 16 inches at the bottom, 

 its height 5 feet 8 inches, and the strata in the interior consisted of a series en- 

 tirely different from those on the outside. 



Mr. Bowman has explained in the Manchester Transactions the causes of the 

 frequent want of correspondence in the strata enclosing a buried tree, and the 

 layers of mud and sand accumulated in the interior, which vary according to 

 the more or less turbid state of the water at the periods when the trunk de- 

 cayed and became hollow, and according to the height to which it was pro- 

 longed upwards in the air or water after it began to be imbedded externally in 

 sediment, and various other accidents. It is not uncommon to observe in 

 Nova Scotia, as in England, that the layers of matter in the inside are fewer 

 than those without. Thus, a " pipe " or cylinder of pure white sandstone, re- 

 presenting the interior of a fossil tree, will sometimes intersect numerous alter- 

 nations of shale and sandstone. In some of the layers in the inside of the 

 trunk, I saw leaves of ferns and fragments of plants which had fallen in together 

 with the sediment. 



Continuing my survey, I found the second of the erect trees separated from 

 the first by a considerable mass of shale and sandstone. This second trunk was 

 about 9 feet in length, traversing various strata, aud cut off at the top by a 

 layer of clay 2 feet thick, on which rested a seam of coal 1 foot thick. This 

 coal formed a foundation on which stood two large trees, about 5 yards apart, 

 each about 2^ feet in diameter and 14 feet long, both enlarging downwards, 

 and one of them bulging considerably at the base. The beds through which 

 they pass consist of shale and sandstone. The cliff was too precipitous to allow 

 me to discover any commencement of roots, but the bottom of the trunks seemed 

 to touch the subjacent coal. Above these trees were beds of bituminous shale 

 and clays with Stigmaria, 1 feet thick, on which rested another bed of coal 

 1 foot thick, and this coal supported two trees, each 1 1 feet high, and 60 yards 

 apart. They appeared to have grown on the coal. One of these, about 2 feet 

 in diameter, preserved nearly the same size from top to bottom, while the other, 

 which was about 14 inches in diameter at the top, enlarged visibly at the base. 

 The irregular furrows of the bark were an inch and half one from the other. 

 The tops of these trees were cut off by a bed of clay, on which rested the main 

 seam of the South Joggins coal, 4 feet thick, above which is another succession 



* Vol. iii. pp. 139- 270. 



