and if I could prove at the same time their connexion with seams of coal, it would go farther than any facts yet recorded to confirm the theory that coal in general is derived from vegetables produced on the spots where the carbonaceous matter is now stored up in the earth.

At Wolfville I hired a schooner, which soon carried us across the Basin of Mines to Parrsborough. We had a side wind, and the deck was inclined at about an angle of 45°, in spite of which we admired a splendid view of the coast, and the range of basaltic rocks which extend from Cape Blomidon to Cape Split. At Parrsborough I was joined by Dr. Gesner, who had come expressly from New Brunswick to meet me; and we went together to Minudie, a thriving village, where we were hospitably received by the chief proprietor and owner of the land, and of of those fertile flats of red mud before described, which he has redeemed from the sea.

many

From Minudie, a range of perpendicular cliffs extends in a south-westerly direction along the southern shore of what is commonly called the Chignecto Channel. The general dip of the beds is southerly, and the lowest strata near Minudie consist of beds of red sandstone, with some limestone and gypsum, a, b, fig. 18. The section is then very obscure for about three miles, or from b to c, the rocks consisting chiefly of red sandstone and red marl, after which, at c, blue grits are seen, inclined to the S.S.W. at an angle of 27°, affording an excellent grindstone, and attaining a thickness of forty-four feet. These beds are succeeded to the south by a vast series of newer and conformable strata, all dipping the same way,

and, for the first three miles which I examined, inclined nearly at the same angle, upon an average about 24° S.S.W. Within this space, or between d and g, all the upright trees hitherto found occur; but the same set of strata is still continuous, with a gradually lessening dip, many miles farther to the

south.

If we assign a thickness of four or five miles to this regular succession of carboniferous strata, which, as I shall afterwards show, must have been originally quite horizontal, our estimate will probably be rather under than over the mark. For the first mile south of the grindstones, or from c to d, I observed no coal in the cliffs, after which the first of the upright trees appears at d, at the distance of about six miles from Minudie. Then followed a series of coal-bearing strata, consisting of white freestone, bituminous shale, micaceous sandstone, sandy clays, blue shale, and clays with and without nodules of ironstone, all resembling the carboniferous rocks of Europe. They occupy a range of coast about two miles long, the vertical height of the cliffs being from 150 to 200 feet; and about nineteen seams of coal have been met with, which vary in thickness from two inches to four feet. At low tide, we had not only the advantage of beholding a fine exposure of the edges of these beds in the vertical precipices, but also a horizontal section of the same on the beach at our feet.

The beds through which erect trees, or rather the trunks of trees, placed at right angles to the planes of stratification, are traceable, have a thickness of about 2500 feet; and no deception can arise from the repetition of the same beds owing to shifts or

faults, the section being unbroken, and the rocks, with the exception of their dip, being quite undisturbed. The first of the upright trees which I saw, in the strata d, fig. 18, is represented in the enlarged section, fig. 19. No part of the original plant is preserved except the bark, which forms a tube of pure bituminous coal, filled with sand, clay, and other deposits, now forming a solid internal cylinder without traces of organic structure. The bark is a quarter of an inch thick, marked externally with irregular longitudinal ridges and furrows, without leaf-scars, and therefore not resembling the regular flutings of Sigillariæ, but agreeing exactly with the description of those vertical trees which are found at Dixonfold, on the Bolton railway, of which Messrs. Hawkshaw and Bowman have given an excellent account in the Proceedings of the Geological Society.* On comparing Mr. Hawkshaw's drawings of the British fossils, in the library of the Geological Society, as well as a specimen of one of the Dixonfold trees presented by him to their museum, with portions of the bark brought by me from Nova Scotia, I have no hesitation in declaring them to be identical.

The diameter of the tree, a. b, fig. 19, was fourteen inches at the top and sixteen inches at the bottom, its height five feet eight inches. The strata in the interior of the tree consisted of a series entirely different from those on the outside. The lowest of the three outer beds which it traversed consisted of purplish and blue shale, c, fig. 19, two feet thick, above which was sandstone, d, one foot thick, and

* London, 1839-40; vol. iii., pp. 139, 270.

above this clay, e, two feet eight inches. In the interior, on the other hand, were nine distinct layers of different composition: at the bottom, shale four inches; then, in the ascending series, sandstone one foot, shale four inches, sandstone four inches, shale eleven inches, clay with nodules of ironstone, f, two inches, pure clay two feet, sandstone three inches, and, lastly, clay four inches.

Mr. Bowman has explained in the Manchester Transactions the causes of the frequent want of correspondence in the strata enclosing a buried tree, and the layers of mud and sand accumulated in the interior, which vary according to the more or less turbid state of the water at the periods when the trunk decayed and became hollow, and according to the height to which it was prolonged upwards in the air or water after it began to be imbedded externally in sediment, and various other accidents. It is not uncommon to observe in Nova Scotia, as in England, that the layers of matter in the inside are fewer than those without. Thus, a "pipe" or cylinder of pure white sandstone, representing the interior of a fossil tree, will sometimes intersect numerous alternations of shale and sandstone. In some of the layers in the inside of the trunk, a, b, fig. 19, and in other trees in this line of cliffs, I saw leaves of ferns and fragments of plants which had fallen in together with the sediment

Continuing my survey, I found the second of the erect trees, e. fig. 18, or a, fig. 21, separated from the first, or from a, b, fig. 19, by a considerable mass of shale and sandstone. This second trunk was about nine feet in length, traversing various strata, and cut