Copy 1

The fossil flora of Great Britain. Or, figures and descriptions of the vegetable remains found in a fossil state in this country / John Lindley, William Hutton.

  • Lindley, John, 1799-1865.
Date:
1831-1837
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The fossil flora of Great Britain. Or, figures and descriptions of the vegetable remains found in a fossil state in this country / John Lindley, William Hutton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    16/396 (page 12)
    6 e Xll by the force of gravity, as is known occasionally to be the case during floods, where trees are re¬ moved along with the soil in which they grew \ and this seems to have been certainly the case with the upright stems in the sandstone of the / French mine of St. Etienne, where the different levels of their roots prove, as M. Constant Prevost has already remarked {Diet, des Sc. art. Terrain,) that they could not have grown where they now stand ; but in the Lias Cliffs near Whitby, where the fragile stems of Equisetum columnare occur perpendicularly, they cannot have been so placed by force of gravity ; and if evidence the most con¬ clusive be required of the fact of vegetables having sometimes been overwhelmed on the spots where they grew during the deposition of the strata, it is furnished by the Fossil Forest of what is called the u Dirt bed,” immediately over the fine building- stone of the Island of Portland; and sub-marine forests of the present day supply us with the same fact, connected with a different order of things. The fossils of the Coal measures occur often in groups; thus in the roof of the coal in Felling Colliery, the remains of Pecopteris heterophylla, (see vol. 1. plate 38,) were, a few years ago, most abundant; tliey occurred alone, almost un¬ mixed with any other, over a considerable space, but, beyond that have been rarely found, so that they are now comparatively scarce. Could such grouping have taken place if the individuals had been swept from a distance ?