106 TRANSACTIONS OF THE 



Phytolithites. 



In North America there is no lack of material in this 

 department of our subject ; but all the information we 

 possess relative to the fossil plants of this country, is 

 disseminated in the various works devoted to natural 

 history. Our fossil vegetables are confined to no family 

 in particular, but consist, as far as yet discovered, of 

 the pine, oak, hickory, walnut, beech, palms, ferns, 

 reeds, grasses, mosses, algse, peat, and lignite in various 

 stages of carbonization. Dicotyledonous lignite is of 

 common occurrence in the deep cut of the Chesapeake 

 and Delaware canal. Numerous popular accounts of 

 submerged forests and petrified trees in scattered loca- 

 lities, will be found in the American Journal of Science 

 and Arts, and occasional notices of similar phenomena 

 in Hitchcock's Geology, and the Journal of the Aca- 

 my of Natural Sciences &c. &c. 



The following remarkable account of a petrified fo- 

 rest, is extracted from a letter of G. H. Crossman, of 

 the United States' Army, published in the Illinois Ma- 

 gazine, during the summer of 1830 : 



*f The enclosed specimen was broken olf from one of 

 the many large stumps and limbs of trees, found near 

 Yellow Stone river, Missouri territory, and brought 

 away by some of the officers attached to the Yellow 

 Stone expedition in 1815. 



u The most remarkable facts, perhaps, with regard 

 to these petrifactions, of what was once a forest of thick 

 timber, are their location and abundance. For a dis- 



