71 
Little doubt can be entertained, of the moory islets of Sutton 
being a part of this extensive and subterraneous stratum, which, by 
some inroad of the sea, has, in that part, been stripped of its cover- 
ing of soil. Sufficient reasons for this opinion, the Doctor thinks, 
are yielded by the identity of the levels, as well as that of the species 
of trees ; the roots of these being affixed, in both, as to the soil 
where they grew ; and, above all, the flattened shape of the trunks, 
branches, and roots, found in the islets, which can only be accounted 
for by the heavy pressure of a superinduced stratum. Such a wide 
spread assemblage of vegetable ruins, lying almost in the same level, 
and that level generally under the common mark of low-water, 
must naturally strike the observer, and give birth to the following 
questions: — 1. What is the epoch of this destruction.^ 2. By what 
agency was it effected ? 
Whilst endeavouring to answer these questions, the learned writer 
supposes, the fossil remains of vegetables, hitherto dug up in so 
many parts of the globe, to belong to two different states of our 
planet. The parts of vegetation, and their impressions, found in 
mountains of cotaceous, schistous, or even sometimes of a calca- 
reous nature, are chiefly of plants now existing between the tropics ; 
which could neither have grown in the latitudes in which they are 
dug up ; nor have been carried and deposited there by any of the 
acting forces, under the present constitution of nature. The forma- 
tion, indeed, he justly remarks, of the very mountains in which they 
are buried, and the nature and disposition of the materials which 
compose them, are such as we cannot account for by any actions, 
and reactions, which, in the actual state of things, take place on the 
surface of the earth. 
The consideration of this order of fossil vegetables obliges us, in 
the opinion of Dr. de Serra, to recur to that period in the history of 
our planet, when the surface of the ocean was at least so much 
