439 
silicious pebbles, must often approach to the globular, or oval form, 
of fruits, these accounts should be received with some degree of 
hesitation. With a similar degree of scepticism should several of 
the petrified fruits be regarded which have been described by Mylius, 
Volckman, and others : the necessity of which caution must be evi- 
dent when it is considered, that Scheuchzer has collected, in his 
Herbarium Diluvianum, and Appendix, many supposed fossil fruits 
which certainly have no right to be so considered. 
In the museum of the late John Hunter, Esq. now in the pos- 
session of the Royal College of Surgeons, is a substance which has 
been considered as a fossil walnut ; appearing to have been formed 
from the internal part of the nut only : and in the British Museum 
is the corresponding part. It bears an exact resemblance in form 
and colour, to its supposed prototype, except being of a whiter 
colour than the inner part of a walnut would be after a few months 
keeping. From this circumstance chiefly I am led to suspect this 
rather to be a specimen of human ingenuity, than of a vegetable 
substance, changed in its nature, by a natural process. 
In the Philosophical Transactions* several of the fossil fruits are 
figured and described, which have been discovered in the Isle of 
Sheppey, and which were sent to James Parsons, M.D. by Mr. Jacob, 
who published, at the end of his Plantes Paver shamensis, an account 
of the fossils he had collected there in the course of thirty years. 
Among these appear to have been a small plum-stone, a cherry- 
stone, a berry of the Sapindus, or soap-tree of America; the ex- 
ternal husk of the fruit of the Sapindus ; a young sand-box, or 
fruit of the Hura ; coffee-berries ; an acorn, without its cup ; be- 
sides these he describes others, of the original nature of which he 
seems to be less confident ; among these are two species of beans , 
a compressed pod, resembling the Arachidna, or under-ground pea ; 
* Philosophical Transactions, Vol. L. Part I. p. 396, 
