28 
STIGMARIA 
Feb., 1889. 
made on the spot of those who are daily in a position to 
notice these fossils (I refer to the underground managers and 
officials at the collieries in the district), it seems that these 
fossils always lie horizontally, or in the plane of the seam, 
and have never been seen to cut obliquely across the grain of 
the coal. In shape and bulk they vary between about 4 inches 
and 2 feet (seldom less or more) in length, and in diameter or 
thickness from 2 to 7 inches; they are generally fiattish. 
In form or shape they vary greatly, some being nearly straight, 
others bending in angles up to 80° or 90°, or possessing a 
twisted, crumpled, distorted, and even folded appearance. 
(Plate II., fig. 5.) Branched or forked specimens are 
not unfrequently found. (Plate II., fig. 6). Many of 
the smallest examples are of about the same bulk as 
a penny bun (Plate II., fig. 4), being nearly circular and 
from 1 to 2 inches thick. More rarely they assume a kind of 
double hooked or S shaped form, the twists being vertically 
nearly under one another, or the upper bend may be a foot or 
so (Plate II., fig. 5) distant from the lower bend a?, such 
bends being turned a good deal to one side (horizontally). 
The various forms noticed are by no means easy to describe ; 
they could be much more easily understood by the aid of short 
rolls of some plastic material such as clay or dough, which 
could be quickly worked up into the forms of these fossils 
were it necessary. Now, as regards the terminals of these fossil 
forms, all I can say is, that with many of them the ends are 
well and neatly rounded off. exhibiting more or less clearly 
the characteristic stigmarian markings (the rootlet-scars). 
With others, and probably with the majority of specimens, 
the case is somewhat different; their ends are either tapered 
down to nothing hardly, or the sandstone assumes an uneven 
or serrated surface, being interstratified with the coal, so that 
we lose the original form of the fossil, either from its being 
impossible to separate the coal from the stone, or because the 
fossil has been forced out of shape. Specimens possessing 
well-defined terminals, therefore, are difficult to extricate from 
the coal. As is usual with almost every specimen of Stigmaria 
we meet with, these Salopian examples show the rootlet-scars 
more clearly upon one side than upon the other, and in 
common with most others, possess little, if any, remains of 
internal organisation. They merely possess the external 
markings already alluded to. and sometimes indications of the 
central axis (medullary cavity or a vascular cylinder). Their 
position in the coal seam varies, being in one place most 
numerous in the upper portion, in another in the middle, and 
now and then chiefly in the lower portion, whilst in some 
