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some disputes of a part of the Society with the publisher of the 
work, he providently resolved to transmit an abridged copy of his 
last paper to the Royal Society of London, who did him the justice 
to publish it in their Transactions, In the same volume, were com- 
municated to the public, the remarks on the Bovey Coal, by Dr, 
Jeremiah Milles, which I have already so fully noticed ; and in this 
paper the opinion of Professor Hollman, respecting the nature of 
this fossil wood, was, as you have seen, disputed, and the mineral 
origin of this substance asserted. The Professor, however, tho- 
roughly convinced of the propriety of the opinion he had adopted, 
sent a paper which, he supposed, would confirm the arguments he had 
employed in his former paper ; but in consequence, as the Professor 
supposes, of its not coming to hand, this paper was never, in any 
way, noticed. When he republished his two first papers, at Gottin- 
gen, in the year 1784, he, therefore, joined to them two additional 
papers : one of which was the paper which had been sent for, but 
had not appeared in, the Philosophical Transactions ; and in which 
he fully evinced the truth and propriety of his former observations ; 
and the other contained some very judicious remarks on the hypo- 
thesis of the gradual change of a cretaceous earth into wood, which 
had been advanced by Stelluti ; and by which Dr. Milles had en- 
deavoured to support his hypothesis of the mineral origin of this 
fossil wood. 
Thus was the first and complete copy of this author’s ingenious 
paper, on this subject, kept for nearly twenty years from the eye of 
the public; and the abridged copy, governed by a fate not less 
severe, made its appearance, under the most unfavourable auspices ; 
since, being published in the same volume of the Philosophical 
Transactions of the Royal Society of London which contained a 
very laboured attempt at refutation of the very opinion he had 
adopted, it appears tb have obtained but little notice. The answer 
to Dr. Milles’s paper, not appearing in the Philosophical Trans- 
VOL. I. R 
