2 
TUE 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 
affinities. 
And there they will lie and rot, posssibly, 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 tJieh' 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 we 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 this 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 uncommonly 
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, 
