J. B. Woodworth — Carboniferous Fossils. 145 



Art. XIX. — Carboniferous Fossils in the Norfolk County 

 Basin; by J. B. Woodworth. 



[Published by permission of the Director of the II. S. Geological Survey.] 



In 1880, Messrs. Crosby and Barton published in this 

 Journal* an account of the discovery by them of traces of 

 fossil plants in the rocks of the Norfolk County basin in Mas- 

 sachusetts at a place near the present station of Pondville on 

 the Walpole & "Wrentham R. R. It was the opinion of the 

 authors that these plants, together with the physical connec- 

 tion of the rocks of this basin with those about Attleborough, 

 Mass., in the northern part of the Narragansett basin, were 

 evidence of the Carboniferous age of the series of strata 

 studied by them. 



Subsequently, the vegetable nature of the fossils was called 

 in question in an unpublished statement by an observer who 

 had visited the. locality and had examined the hollow casts de- 

 scribed by the original discoverers. In April, 1892, the 

 present writer under the guidance of Mr. Barton, to whom 

 belongs the credit of the discovery, visited the locality, and 

 from a small opening similar to the numerous larger holes 

 which were appealed to in 1880 as evidence of fossil plants, 

 abstracted the solid cast of a longitudinally, coarsely striated 

 stem, probably but not certainly identifiable with a species of 

 sigillaria or calamites. Between the cast of the interior and 

 the matrix of sandstone was a limonitic and cellular layer 

 apparently representing the cortical part of the plant, too 

 poorly preserved for identification. In many of the holes 

 originally described by Messrs. Crosby and Barton, the same 

 ferruginous and cellular layer was seen. These plant remains 

 occur in sandy beds or partings in a simple, quartzose con- 

 glomerate, which outcrops in nearly vertical strata along two 

 lines on either side of a synclinal axis. 



In greenish slates, lying above the conglomerate bed, were 

 found cylindrical, vermiform casts, of small size, apparently 

 the underground rootlets of plants. In none of these speci- 

 mens, however, are afforded characters which enable one to 

 discriminate them from plant remains which occur elsewhere 

 in rocks of Devonian age,f the period to which the red beds of 

 this basin were referred by Prof. Edward Hitchcock. 



* Extension of the Carboniferous formation in Massachusetts, 3d ser., vol. xx, 

 pp. 416-420. 



f See Sir William Dawson, The Geological History of Plants. 



