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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1808 Excerpt: ...By the same lens I was enabled to trace similar lines, undulating on several parts of the flatter surface; and, in one or two spots, could discover six or eight of these lines, running pretty... More

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1808 Excerpt: ...By the same lens I was enabled to trace similar lines, undulating on several parts of the flatter surface; and, in one or two spots, could discover six or eight of these lines, running pretty straight, close and parallel with each other, and connected together by numerous lateral minute fibres or tubuli, giving the appearance of a species of microscopic tubipore, rather than of millepore, madrapore, or alcyonium. A magnified figure of this part of the fossil is presented Plate XII. Fig. 13, c. But were we even capable of determining the genus of this microscopic poiypean fabric, still we, perhaps, should thereby make but little progress, in ascertaining the real nature of the large ramose bodies, which seem to bear no other relationship to the minute tubiporean bodies just described, than merely serving as a ground-work, on which they have been formed. Of the real nature of the ramose bodies themselves, I must confess myself unable to form a conjecture which seems to make any approach to probability. That they are the remains of some animal substances, formed by the labours of polypes, appears to be indubitable, from the situation in which they are found, and from the bodies with which they are associated; but every character which they possess, differs materially from those of any known substance, which has been marked by the pen or pencil of the natural historian, as deriving its origin from such a source. On examining the substance of which these several fossils of St. Peter's Mountain are formed, numerous variously figured cavities are observable, evidently formed by shells and other marine bodies, which, having been removed, have left spaces exactly corresponding with the forms which they possessed. It is most probably from this circumstance, that some...

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