HE VIEWS. 
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, Lepidodeudron, 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 tinny 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 off 
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 
Sigillarige of the coal, are laminated or bedded, and the lamina?, 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 Sigillaria, 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 carefidly 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 re])tilian 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. Dcshayes, as probably a land-snail, and has since 
been named Fupa vetusta. 
