Fossil PLANTS. Many species of tender and herbaceous plants are found at this day, in great abundance, buried at considerable depths in the earth, and converted, as it were, into the nature of the matter they lie among; fossil wood is often found very little altered, and often impregnated with substances of almost all the different fossil kinds, and lodged in all the several strata, sometimes firmly imbedded in hard matter; sometimes loose: but this is by no means the case with the tenderer and
more delicate subjects of the vegetable world. These are usually immersed either in a blackish flaty substance, found lying over the strata of coal, else in loose nodules of ferruginous matter of a pebble-like form, and they are always altered into the nature of the substance they lie among: what we meet with of these are principally of the fern kind; and what is very singular, though a very certain truth, is, that these are principally the ferns of American growth, not those of our own climate. The most frequent fossil plants are the polypody, spleenwort, osmund, trichomanes, and the several larger and smaller ferns; but besides these there are also found pieces of the equisetum or horse-tail, and joints of the stellated plants, as the clivers, madder, and the like; and these have been too often mistaken for flowers; sometimes there are also found complete grasses, or parts of them, as also reeds, and other watery plants; sometimes the ears of corn, and not unfrequently the twigs or bark, and impressions of the bark and fruit of the pine or fir kind, which have been, from their scaly appearance, mistaken for the skins of fishes; and sometimes, but that very rarely, we meet with mosses and sea-plants.
Many of the ferns not unfrequently found, are of very singular kinds, and some species yet unknown to us; and the leaves of some appear set at regular distances, with round protuberances and cavities. The stones which contain these plants split readily, and are often found to contain, on one side, the impression of the plant, and on the other the prominent plant itself; and, beside all that have been mentioned, there have been frequently supposed to have been found with us ears of common wheat, and of the maize or Indian corn; the first being in reality no other than the common end-most branches of the firs, and the other the thicker boughs of various species of that and of the pine kind, with their leaves fallen off; such branches in such a state cannot but afford many irregular tubercles and papillae, and, in some species, such as are more regularly disposed.
These are the kinds most obvious in England; and these are either immersed in the flaty stone which constitutes whole strata, or in flattened nodules usually of about three inches broad, which readily split into two pieces on being struck.
They are most common in Kent, in coal-pits near Newcastle, and the forest of Dean in Gloucestershire; but are more or less found about almost all our coal-pits, and many of our iron mines. Though these seem the only species of plants found with us, yet in Germany there are many others, and those found in different substances. A whitish stone, a little harder than chalk, frequently contains them: they are found also often in a gray flaty stone of a firmer texture, not unfrequently in a blackish one, and at times in many others. Nor are the bodies themselves less various here than the matter in which they are contained: the leaves of trees are found in great abundance, among which those of the willow, poplar, white thorn, and pear trees, are the most common; small branches of box, leaves of the olive tree, and stalks of garden thyme, are also found there; and sometimes ears of the various species of corn, and the larger as well as the smaller mosses in great abundance.
These seem the tender vegetables, or herbaceous plants, certainly found thus immersed in hard stone, and buried
buried at great depths in the earth: others of many kinds there are also named by authors; but as in bodies so imperfect errors are easily fallen into, these seem all that can be ascertained beyond mere conjecture.