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fifty : in the region of the Axe twenty. In the carboni- 
ferous formation two hundred have been collected, and in 
our British coal strata one hundred and twenty. It has 
been several times mentioned what a softness and elegance 
is given to the scenery by the various Berns which adorn 
our heath fields, hedge-banks and woods. In like manner 
the Fossil Ferns, from their beautiful structure and neatly 
divided foliage, are the most remarkable and attractive 
vegetable remains in the ancient strata. Dr. Buckland in 
his Bridgewater Treatise observes The finest example I 
have ever witnessed is that of the coal mines of Bohemia. 
The most elaborate imitations of living foliage upon the 
painted ceilings of Italian palaces bear no comparison with 
the beauteous profusion of extinct vegetable forms, with 
which the galleries of those instructive coal mines are over- 
hung. The roof is covered as with a canopy of gorgeous 
tapestry, enriched with festoons of most graceful foliage, 
flung in wild irregular profusion over every portion of its 
surface. The effect is heightened by the contrast of the 
coal black colour of these vegetables with the light ground- 
work of the rock to which they are attached. The spectator 
feels himself transported, as if by enchantment, into the 
forests of another world ; he beholds trees of forms and 
characters now unknown upon the face of the earth, pre- 
sented to his senses almost in the vigour and beauty of their 
primeval life ; their scaly stems and bending branches, with 
their delicate apparatus of foliage are all spread forth before 
him, little impaired by the lapse of countless ages, and bear- 
ing faithful records of extinct systems of vegetation which 
began and terminated in times of which these relics are the 
infallible historians.” 
In classifying living Ferns, the position of the fruit, the 
absence or presence of the elastic ring to the bags of spores, 
and of the covers to the masses of fruit ; the shape, attach- 
ment, and situation of these covers are the groundwork on 
which the genera and suborders are founded. As the Fossil 
Ferns are for the most part destitute of fructification, it is 
impossible to adopt the same method of classification. To 
obviate this great difficulty, M. Adolphe Brogniart intro- 
duced a system, which is now constantly followed, of taking 
the form of the leaflets, and the direction and character of 
