REVIEWS. 



437 



would settle this question, but neither have as yet been found. That there were large 

 animals of the labyrinthodontal form in the Coal period, is proved by the footprints dis- 

 covered by Dr. King in Pennsylvania, which may have been produced by an animal of 

 the type of Baphetes. On the other hand, that there were large swimming reptiles, 

 seems established by the recent discovery of the vertebrae of Eosaurus Acadianus, at the 

 Joggins, by Mr. Marsh. The locomotion of Baphetes must have been vigorous and 

 rapid, but it may have been effected both on land and in water, and either by feet or 

 tail, or both. 



" With the nature of its habitat we are better acquainted. The area of the Albion 

 Mines coal-field was somewhat exceptional in its character. It seems to have been a 

 bay or indentation in the Silurian land, separated from the remainder of the coal-field by 

 a high shingle beach, now a bed of conglomerate. 



"We may imagine a large lake or lagune, loaded with trunks of trees and decaying 

 vegetable matter, having in its shallow parts, and along its sides, dense brakes of Cala- 

 mites, and forests of Sigillaria, Lepidodendron, and other trees of the period, extending 

 far on every side as damp pestilential swamps. In such a habitat, uninviting to us, but, 

 no doubt, suited to Baphetes, that creature crawled through swamps and thickets, wal- 

 lowed in flats of black mud, or swam and dived in search of its finny prey. It was, in 

 so far as we know, the monarch of these swamps, though there is evidence of the existence of, 

 similar creatures of this type quite as large in other parts of the Nova Scotia coalfield." 



The first discovery of the remains of a reptile, the Dendrerpeton Aca- 

 dianum, and a land-shell in the interior of a great tree in the coal-measures 

 of Nova Scotia, was primarily announced in a joint paper by Dr. Dawson 

 and Sir Charles Lyell, before the Geological Society of London : — 



" The South Joggins Section is, among other things, remarkable for the number of 

 beds which contain remains of erect trees embedded in situ: these trees are for the most 

 part Sigillarise, varying in diameter from six inches to five feet. They have grown in 

 underclays and wet soils, similar to those in which the coal was accumulated ; and these 

 having been submerged or buried by mud carried down by inundations, the trees, killed 

 by the accumulations around their stems, have decayed, and their tops being broken oif 

 at the level of the mud or sand, the cylindrical cavities, left open by the disappearance of 

 the wood, and preserved in their form by the greater durability of the bark, have been 

 filled with sand and clay. This, now hardened into stone, constitutes pillar-like casts of 

 the trees, which may often be seen exposed in the cliffs, and which, as these waste away, 

 fall upon the beach. The sandstones enveloping these pillared trunks of the ancient 

 Sigillarite of the coal, are laminated or bedded, and the laminse, when exposed, split 

 apart with the weather, so that the trees themselves become split across ; this being 

 often aided by the arrangement of the matter within the trunks, in layers more or 

 less corresponding to those without. Thus one of these fossil trees usually falls to the 

 beach in a series of disks, somewhat resembling the grindstones which are exten- 

 sively manufactured on the coast. The surfaces of these fragments often exhibit re- 

 mains of plants which have been washed into the hollow trunks and have been em- 

 bedded there; and in our explorations of the shore, we always carefully scrutinized such 

 specimens, both with the view of observing whether they retained the superficial mark- 

 ings of Sigillarise, and with reference to the fossils contained in them. It was while 

 examining a pile of these ' fossil grindstones,' that we were surprised by finding on one 

 of them what seemed to be fragments of bone. On careful search other bones appeared, 

 and they had the aspect, not of remains of fishes, of which many species are found fossil 

 in these coal-measures, but rather of limb-bones of a quadruped. The fallen pieces of 

 the tree were carefully taken up, and other bones disengaged, and at length a jaw with 

 teeth made its appearance. We felt quite confident, from the first, that these bones 

 were reptilian ; and the whole, being carefully packed and labelled, were taken by Sir 

 Charles to the United States, and submitted to Professor J. Wyman, of Cambridge, who 

 recognized their reptilian character, and prepared descriptive notes of the principal bones, 

 which appeared to have belonged to two species. He also observed among the fragments 

 an object of different character, apparently a shell, which was recognized by Dr. Gould, 

 of Boston, and subsequently by Mr. Deshayes, as probably a land-snail, and has since 

 been named Pupa vetusta. 



