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fibres are very confused ; the same fibres running straight, oblique, 
transverse, circular, and indeed in every possible direction, which, 
he observes, is never the case in vegetable wood. 
Pillingen, who wrote expressly on the fossil wood of Meizlibizen, 
in Misnia, between Ziza and Altenberg, gives the following accurate 
description of it; he entertaining the same opinion of its mineral 
origin with Schoockius. Whilst digging in a valley, at the foot of a 
mountain, near Altenberg, which had been deepened by frequent 
strong currents of rain water, flowing from this and the adjacent 
mountains ; wonderful, he says, to behold, at a little distance from 
the surface, they found a substance like decayed wood, capable of 
being inflamed ; bearing marks resembling those wdiich result from 
an annual increase ; and, in a word, so formed by nature, that water 
was not more like to water, nor milk to milk, than this mineral wood, 
thus formed by nature, was to vegetable wood. The fibres of this 
wood, unlike to vegetable wood, were contorted and twisted in almost 
every direction, and it was generally found split into slices or chips. 
It was very light, except when containing pyrites, and its colour was 
a darkish brown. Whilst burning, it yielded a sulphurous or bitu- 
minous smell, and was thereby resolved into a light white earth, not 
unlike to amianthus, or plumose alum. White, hard, and exceed- 
ingly heavy pyrites, and particles of sulphur, he observes, were 
found very abundantly in this vein of fossil wood. 
Beneath this layer of wood, the earth was strongly bituminous for 
nearly seven feet deep, and differed hardly in any thing from the 
wood itself, except that the fibres, which were distinguishable in the 
wood, were not here to be discovered of the same length : it was 
also much more frequently divided by clefts. 
At first, on perceiving that this wood was so light as to swim on 
water , that it inflamed on being ignited ; that it bore the marks of 
the long veins of wood ; and, that it even had knots from which the 
boughs appeared to have grown ; he concluded it to be real wood. 
