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45 
Ordinary Meeting, December 13th, 1864. 
R. Angus Smith, Ph.D., F.R.S., President, in the Chair. 
Mr. Edward Sonstadt was elected an Ordinary Member of 
the Society. 
Mr. Binney, F.R.S., exhibited some spores of plants 
found in the splint coal of Methill, Fifeshire. He said that 
many years ago he read a paper on some similar fossils before 
the Geological Society of London, and it was printed in the 
Journal of the Society for May, 1849. Those specimens were 
from a nodule found in the King Coal seam at Wigan. 
They also were met with in the Wigan Four Feet Coal in 
greater abundance. Since that time Professor Balfour, F.R.S. 
of Edinburgh, had described, in a paper printed in vol. xx of 
the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, some 
similar fossils from the Fordel splint coal. The specimens 
exhibited were small lenticular bodies of a chestnut colour, 
about a line in diameter. They occurred in countless num- 
bers, indeed forming a very considerable portion of the seam 
of coal itself. He stated that he had found them in equal 
abundance in the Eight Feet, Main, Wood, and Pirnie Well 
seams, but always in the splint or bone part of the coal. Dr. 
Hooker had proved that similar spores belonged to the 
Lepidodendron. The thick coating of the spore has doubtless 
afforded some protection to it as well as the peculiar process 
of bituminisation to which splint coal has been subjected, 
and different from that which soft or cherry coal has under- 
gone. He said that when w^e considered the great abundance 
of these small fossils in all splint coals, and the immense 
Pkoceedings Lit. & Phil. Society.— Vol. IV.— No. 6.— SESSION 1864-5. 
