586 
ME. E. W. BINNEY ON SOME LOWER-COAL-SEAM EOSSIL PLANTS. 
The beds occurred in the following (descending) order, namely, 
ft. in. 
1. Black shale full of fossil shells and containing calcareous concretions 1 6 
2. Halifax Hard seam with the nodules containing the fossil plants . 2 0 
3. Floor of fire-clay and Gannister, full of Stigmaria jicoides . 
The fossil-wood is found in nodules dispersed throughout the coal, some being spherical 
and others elongated and flattened ovals, varying in size from the bulk of a common pea 
to 8 and 10 inches in diameter. In some portions of the seam of coal the nodules are 
so numerous as to render it utterly useless, and they will occur over a space of several 
acres, and then for the most part disappear and again occur as numerous as ever. For 
a distance of from twenty-five to thirty miles the nodules occur in this seam of coal in 
more or less abundance, but always containing the same plants. Fossil shells are rarely 
met with in the nodules found in the coal, but they occur abundantly in the large cal- 
careous concretions found in the roof of the mine, and are there associated with JDadoxy- 
lon containing Sternbergia-Yrihs, which plant has not yet been noticed in the coal, and 
Lepidostrobus. So far as my experience extends, the nodules in the coal are always found 
associated with the occurrence of fossil shells in the roof, and may probably be owing 
to the presence of mineral matter held in solution in water, and precipitated upon or 
aggregated around certain centres in the mass of the vegetable matter now forming coal 
before the bituminization of such vegetables took place. No doubt such nodules con- 
tain a fair sample of the plants of which the seams of coal in which they are found 
was formed, and their calcification was most probably chiefly due to the abundance 
of shells afterwards accumulated in the soft mud now forming the shale overlying 
the coal. 
The specimen illustrated in Plate XXXI. fig. 1, is of an irregular oval shape, 1 foot 
3 inches in circumference, 7 inches across its major, and 3J inches across its minor axis. 
When first discovered it was 8 inches in length, and only a fragment of a much larger 
stem. The light-coloured disk in the middle, about an inch in diameter, shows the 
central axis and the internal radiating cylinder of woody tissue, while the indistinct 
radiating lines towards the circumference indicate the outer cylinder, formed of thick- 
walled tubes or utricles of quadrangular form arranged in wedge-shaped masses divided 
by coarse muriform tissue, increasing in the opposite direction as to their size that the 
wedge-shaped masses do : all of the natural size. 
Fig. 2 shows the outside appearance of the specimen marked with fine longitudinal 
striae, irregular ribs and furrows, and some cicatrices of leaf-scars, which would induce 
most collectors of coal-plants to class it with a decorticated specimen of Sigillaria. It 
most resembles Sigillaria organum. The bark of a portion of the specimen remains 
attached to it in the form of coal, that is united to the matrix of the seam in which the 
fossil was found imbedded. The reverse side of the specimen does not show the character 
so distinctly. 
Here we have a Stigmaria-like woody cylinder, with a central axis composed of barred 
