302 BOTANY AND PALEONTOLOGY 



place, the coal is overlaid by seven to eight feet of grayish-yellow, soft, 

 very brittle shales, full of remains of plants. At the top of the shales 

 appears another bed of coal a few inches thick. Near by, the shales over- 

 tying the coal are fifty to sixty feet thick, and black, micaceous, with very 

 few prints of plants, if any. The second bed of coal is not formed at this 

 last opening. Down the creek, the shales become in places yellow, hard, 

 and half transformed into carbonate of iron and clay ironstones. This 

 conformation is still in accordance with what has been reported of the Sub- 

 conglomerate coal of Morgan County, Kentucky, where Well's coal-bank, 

 twenty-two inches thick, is separated from another thin bed of coal, five to 

 six inches thick, by sixteen feet of black shales. This leads us to remark 

 that as, occasionally, the shales covering the coal are not present, and the 

 coal is immediately covered by the conglomerate, so in like manner, when 

 two beds of coal have been formed, the intermediate shales may thin in 

 such a way that both coal-beds become united in one, being only separated 

 by a clay parting. 



In descending Lee creek and entering Crawford county, ten and a half 

 miles below Woton's coal-bank, we found in the creek large pieces of sand- 

 stone covered with Fucoides cauda-galli, a kind of fossil plant said to be 

 peculiar to the Chemung group, or Upper Devonian. As the general dip 

 in that part of the country is to the southwest, or in the same direction 

 which we were following, the presence of this Devonian species appears 

 here an anomaly, and can only be explained by some peculiar disturbance 

 of the strata, or rather by the supposition that this species has a much 

 wider range of distribution than had till now been supposed. In some 

 places, along the margins of the eastern coal-basin of Kentucky, the Con- 

 glomerate is sometimes immediately underlaid by this formation of the 

 Fucoides cauda-galli. 



CRAWFORD COUNTY. 



Except the nomenclature of the fossil plants found in connection with 

 this coal there is scarcely anything to add to the exact description given 

 of it by Professor E. T. Cox, page 226 of the first Report The shales 

 overlying the coal are about twenty feet thick, and generally black or 

 grayish-blue, hard, micaceous, very bituminous in their approach to the 

 coal, where they only contain remains of fossil plants. From top to bot- 

 tom they are intermixed with pebbles of carbonate of iron in abundance. 

 The vegetable remains of these shales are mostly those of Cordaites boras- 

 sifolia (Ung.), a plant which covers, or apparently constitutes the shales for 

 about two feet of their thickness. The leaves of the species, which were 

 long and ribbon-like, filled alone great spaces of the marshes of the coal 



