2 



THE GEOLOGIST. 



admission that we do not know what they are, and we ask as frankly 

 for information or suggestions. 



Some indeed, such as the coffee-like berries, fig-like fruits, and 

 nipadites of the London Clay, carry in themselves the palpable 

 evidence of the classes to which they belong ; but there are many 

 specimens from other rocks remaining undescribed in many a col- 

 lector's cabinet from the want of the ability to give anything like 

 a reasonable suggestion as to what they were, and often, indeed, 

 from the sheer incapacity to assign to them even any probable 

 afiinities. 



And there they will lie and rot, possibly, if their owners are not 

 bold enough to confess their ignorance and ask for information. For 

 them our pages offer a means of inquiry which they do not possess 

 for us. Anonymously they can ask their questions ; openly we must 

 ask ours. These chalk fruits puzzle us, we confess it. Not because 

 we could not soon find some fruits like them in outward form and 

 shape, but because wt really do not understand their mode of pre- 

 servation. Any one can see from our drawings (Plate I., and wood- 

 cut, fig. 1) that, flattened as they now are, such flattening is due 

 to pressure in the substance of the rock, and that originally they 

 were round in form. As they are preserved, they are roundish lumps 

 of chalk enveloped in a dark brown ochreous skin. 



A superficial observer might look upon this ochreous skin as the 

 real rind of the fruit, but these fruit-masses are perforated by large 

 teredines (see woodcut, fig. 1), as if the central part of the fruit had 

 been of a solid nut-like character, such as we see in the vegetable 

 ivory. 



And yet, if tliis were so, — and teredines bore we know only in hard 

 substances, — how is it that the central solid part has all rotted away, 

 and its place been supplanted with the same soft calcareous chalk as 

 the stratum in which the fossils were imbedded, while the more tender 

 skin only is preserved ? 



In the same beds of chalk with the fruits, there are not unconnnonly 

 to be met with fragments of fossil wood, reduced likewise to thin 

 skin-like ochreous layers, and bored too, through and through, by 

 teredos. These not only show the rotting away of the solid fibrous 

 wood, but also its reduction to the film-like state in which we see 

 it spread on the surface of the chalk. But these wood-fragments 

 might have lain on the still, slowly accumulating surface of the 

 cretaceous ocean-bottom, and have rotted down to their last pellicle 

 in the ponderous lapse of time. Not so the fruits : they, if solid, 



