280 
Dr. Woodward thus describes a specimen in his collection*: “A 
piece of wood having manifest marks of its having been charred, or 
burned by the fire, before it was buried in the earth. It is not 
unusual to meet with wood, thus burned, reposited in the bowels of 
the earth.” 
In the copper mines of the Ryphean mountains, in Siberia, and in 
the neighbourhood also of Cazan, the copper is found united with 
blend, sand, and wood, forming a hard and compact mass. The 
vegetable parts are so brittle as to be easily detached; the wood 
being black, resembling a charcoal f . 
The Abbe Fortis relates, that in Luzanne, on the side of the bed 
of the torrent called Gipalova Vrilo, he found the roots and trunk 
of a tree, three feet in circumference, reduced to a fossil coal. The 
particularity by which this coal trunk was distinguished, was its 
having been cut, little more than a foot above the root, by a hatchet, 
or some other similar instrument, before the marine strata covered it. 
I leave, the Abbe says, to those who are more knowing than myself, 
to decide by how ancient a hatchet this tree has been cut, and in 
what times those lands have been covered by the waters of a sea 
now far from us, and which has left behind it a prodigious quantity 
of exotic testacei . — In the accompanying gravel are heavy pieces 
of lava, sometimes black and sometimes grey, fossil coal, and bi- 
tuminous scissile earth. 
Mr. Cramer, Counsellor of Mines at Altenkirchen, in the second 
volume of Der Gesellschaft Naturforschenda Freimde zu JBerlin Neue 
Schriften, relates, that in the county of Wachtersbach, in the princi- 
pality of Isenberg-Birstein, under the exterior crust, there first occurs 
a strong stratum of white and red sand-stone, in alternate order, 
* Catalogue of English Fossils, part ii. p. 19. 
t Voyage en Siberie, en 1761, par Mens. I’Abbe Chappe d’Auteroche, tome i. partie ii. 
p. 671., 
