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habits, who did not remember to have met with vegetable 
impressions in coal. He had lately seen some beautiful spe- 
cimens distinctly marked on the surface of anthracite coal at 
a mine in Pembrokeshire, and these impressions he was 
informed were peculiar to one seam or vein of coal. He 
should be glad, therefore, to learn from any of the gentlemen 
present, whether in the coal seams of Yorkshire vegetable 
impressions were found on the substance of the coal itself, or 
chiefly, as in most of the coal fields with which he was ac- 
quainted, in the associated beds of shale, sandstone, &c. 
Mr. Embleton remarked that Mr. Sopwith's question, 
whether fossil plants were ever found in the coal itself, could 
be answered in the affirmative. At Ardsley Colliery, in the 
Haigh Moor coal, impressions of the Stigmaria Ficoides are 
often found, and in some localities, in such numbers that the 
working of the coal is very much obstructed and its quality 
deteriorated ; and an instance of fossils being found im- 
bedded in coal is to be seen in the Stanley main coal, at 
the Groves Colliery, near Wakefield ; indeed, the presence 
of fossils in coal was of frequent occurrence in Yorkshire, 
and was a sure sign of the inferiority of the coal. In 
answer to the observations made by his Lordship with 
respect to identifying strata by means of fossils, he was 
sorry to say that, with their present limited knowledge on 
the subject, the question could not be answered, for we have 
yet to learn the particular species of fossils that each stratum 
in the coal field contains. Take as an example the strata 
in the neighbourhood of Barnsley, where the thick coal has 
been sunk to at a considerable depth in many places, and 
where there are many collieries. We do not know in what 
order the fossils are found in the strata, nor do we even know 
what fossils they contain. How, then, can we answer this 
important question ? for the same remark is equally as 
applicable to every other district of the Yorkshire coal field, 
