584 
SECOND REPORT —1832. 
which he has made on the botanical character of the vegetable 
remains preserved in the strata of the earth. By his method of 
reducing the hardest fossils to slices so thin that the structure 
may be clearly traced, he has been enabled to examine the in¬ 
ternal organization of the stems of numerous fossil plants, both 
in their transverse, and lately to a still greater advantage, in 
their longitudinal section; and this examination leads him to 
conclude that the number of gymnospermous phanerogamic 
plants in the early deposits of coal, will be found greatly to 
exceed what those who have written upon the subject have 
formed any conception of. The author mentions various locali¬ 
ties near Edinburgh, Berwick, Newcastle, and Durham, where 
abundance of plants of this character have been found ; the 
fossil trees discovered at Craigleith, near Edinburgh, between 
40 and 50 feet long, with a diameter of five feet at their lower 
extremity, and that found at Widespen, near Newcastle, mea¬ 
suring 72 feet in length, appear to be Coniferce ; but he thinks 
that some of these plants vary materially from true Coniferae, 
showing a difference of structure, especially in the longitudinal 
section, in w r hich they bear a nearer resemblance to the true 
Dicotyledon. The vascular cryptogamic plants are undoubtedly 
in much greater proportion in some parts of the series of de¬ 
posits ; but in the Lothian basin, which contains 33 beds of 
coal, as well as amongst the lower coals of Northumberland, 
Durham, and Yorkshire, the remains of cryptogamic plants, 
and especially ferns , are exceedingly rare, and the author attri¬ 
butes the contrast observable between the coal system of York¬ 
shire and Newcastle on the one hand, rich, as to its upper beds, 
in ferns and cryptogamic reliquice , and that of Scotland on the 
other, remarkable for the quantity of trunks of phanerogamic 
plants—to a difference in the ancient physical geography of the 
countries where the coal was formed. The memoir concluded 
with a description of the traces of structure observed by the 
author in various kinds of coal. Bovey coal and Jet have both 
been evidently wood ; and in the former an indistinct resem¬ 
blance to coniferous structure may be observed in parallel se¬ 
ries of square or hexagonal marks. In Cannel coal the longi¬ 
tudinal section presents a confused cellular tissue, like that of 
a vascular plant; but in the fibrous and slaty coal of the moun¬ 
tain limestone, the author has remarked very decided traces of 
a structure much resembling the coniferous, and leaving no 
doubt that the plants of which it was formed must be classed 
among the phanerogamic. 
Mr, John Taylor washed to call the attention of geologists 
