Mr. Bowerbank has shown that they are nearly related to the fruit of the Nipa, or Molucca-Palm, a tree which abounds in Bengal, and in the Molucca and Philippine Islands. The Nipæ are low, shrub-like plants, having the general aspect of palms; they grow in marshy tracts, at the mouths of great rivers, particularly where the waters are brackish. They are allied to the Cocoa-nut tribe, on the one hand, and to the _Pandanus_, or Screw-pine, on the other. The _Nipadites_, according to Mr. Bowerbank, have the epicarp and endocarp thin and membranous, and the sarcocarp thick and pulpy, and composed of cellular tissue, through which run numerous bundles of vessels. Nearly in the centre of the pericarp is situated a large seed which, when broken, is more or less hollow. This seed consists of regular layers of cells, radiating from a spot situated near the middle, and apparently inclosing a central embryo. The same author remarks, that "if the habits of the plants to which the fossil fruits belonged were similar to those of the recent _Nipa_, it will account for their abundance in the London Clay in the Isle of Sheppey; which formation, from the great variety of stems and branches, mixed up with star-fishes, shells of mollusks, and bones of fishes, crustaceans, and reptiles of numerous marine and fresh-water genera, is strikingly characteristic of the delta of a river, which probably flowed from near the Equator towards the spot where these interesting relics are deposited." The fact that the seed-vessels of several species of Nipadites abound in the Isle of Sheppey, and have not been observed in any other locality in England, tends to support this opinion. Carpolithes of this kind occur in great perfection in the Eocene strata of Belgium, and were figured and described, nearly seventy years since, in Burton's "_Oryctographie de Bruxelles_," as petrified cocoa-nuts; the uncompressed state in which these fossils occur makes the resemblance to the recent fruit more striking than in the flattened pyritous specimens from the clay of Sheppey. [Sidenote: NIPADITES OF BELGIUM.]