113 
Ordinary Meeting, February &0th, 1866. 
R. Angus Smith, Ph.D., F.R.S., &c., President, in 
the Chair. 
Mr. E. W. Binney, F.R.S., said that in the calcareous 
nodules found in the Upper Foot coal, a mine lying about 
fifteen yards above the Gannister coal at Moorside and other 
places near Oldham, he had met with a small stem of fossil 
wood showing structure in a very perfect state. It evidently 
belonged to the genus Pinites of Witham, since changed by 
Endlicher and Brongniart into Dadoxylon ; but after com- 
paring it with the species figured and described by those 
authors, and more lately by Professor Schimper of Stras- 
bourg, he was of opinion that it was a new one. The speci- 
men was also more complete than any other with which he 
was acquainted, although it was but of diminutive size. 
It has generally been supposed that the coniferous woods 
found in the coal measures were only to be met with in sand- 
stone rocks, and not in seams of coal or beds of shale, and 
had been drifted from high and dry lands into the waters in 
which such deposits had been formed, and had not grown on 
the places where they were discovered like Sigillaria and its 
root tStigmaria. The specimen of Dadoxylon now described, 
however, had equal claim to be supposed to have grown on 
the spot where it was found as any Sigillaria met with in the 
same seam of coal. 
The stem is nearly cylindrical and enveloped in a matrix 
of limestone, so that we cannot see its external characters. 
Its diameter is about one half of an inch. 
On examination of a transverse section of the stem we find 
a medullary axis composed of irregular polygonal cells full of 
dark carbonaceous matter separated by intervening spaces 
Proceedings — I, it. & Phil. Society. — Yol. V. — No. 11 — Session 1865-6. 
