132 
On some Fossil Plants 
of lime ; and this is equally the case whether these overlay sand¬ 
stone, shale, the claystone above, trap itself, or this calcareous bed. 
The bed of superincumbent loam, from 10 to 15 feet in depth, 
contains calcareous bodies of various size and figure, yet possess¬ 
ing sufficient regularity to bespeak an organic origin. 
One, the most striking in number and appearance, bears ex¬ 
teriorly a close resemblance to the fungus, known as “ native 
bread,” the Mylitta Australis, and occurs from the size of a small 
tennis ball to that of an irregular flattened oval of about 10 or 12 
inches by 6. The exterior is a rough brown, studded at intervals 
with plates of oxide of iron. When this brown cortical surface is 
removed and disintegration has taken place from atmospheric 
influences, the same irregular cuboid structure is disclosed, which 
results from the effect of long-continued weathering upon a broken 
surface of “ native bread.” 
The next most remarkable form is that of a flattened spheroid 
of 4 to 5 inches through, which has the axis of its short diameter 
slightly produced into a rounded knob on one side, from which 
pass broad elevated and somewhat rounded meridional bands at 
right angles to its greatest circumference. 
The third and least frequent form is an oval flattened on one 
side like our oblong Echini, having a smooth surface irregularly 
intersected with fissures which tend rather than radiate to the 
centre, and form the natural cleavage of the mass. 
Other oval bodies are also found having within thin shell-like 
walls nuclei of corresponding forms and dimensions. It is likely 
that close and continued observations may discover in them such 
invariable and essential characteristics as will at length determine 
their nature and origin. 
I think that the first-mentioned of these imbedded calcareous 
masses has been “ native bread,” or fungi of similar appearance 
and structure originally; and I am confirmed in this notion by 
having recently discovered in a bed of loam near Launceston, 
similar fungi, having the brown external cortical crust or rind 
entire, and retaining for the most part its chiefly vegetable cha¬ 
racter; while internally the fungoid substance had been replaced 
by a clayey earth, subdivided aud partitioned off by the extension 
