I was first struck, on descending among the workmen, by the comparative abundance of the vegetable remains. In some parts of the quarries almost every layer of the strata is covered by carbonaceous markings--irregularly grooved stems, branching oat into boughs at acute angles, and that at the first glance seem the miniature semblances of the trunks of gnarled oaks and elms, blackened in a morass, and still retaining the rough bark, chapped into furrows: oblong, leaf-like impressions, too, and impressions of more slender form, that resemble the narrow, parallel edged leaves of the sea-grass weed. I observed, in particular, one large bunch of riband-like leaflets converging into a short stem, so that the whole resembled a scourge of cords; and I would fain have detached it from the rock, but it lay on a mouldering film of clay, and broke up with my first attempt to remove it. A stalk of sea-grass weed plucked up by the roots, and compressed in a herbarium, would present a somewhat similar appearance. Among the impressions there occur irregularly shaped patches, reticulated into the semblance of polygonal meshes. They remind one of pieces of ill-woven lace; for the meshes are unequal in size, and the polygons irregular. (See Plate IX., fig. 2.) When first laid open, every mesh is filled with a carbonaceous speck; and from their supposed resemblance to the eggs of the frog, the workmen term them _puddock spawn_. They are supposed by Mr. Lyell to form the remains of the eggs of some gasteropodous mollusc of the period. I saw one flagstone, in particular, so covered with these reticulated patches, and so abundant, besides, in vegetable impressions of both the irregularly furrowed and grass-weed-looking class, that I could compare it to only the bottom of a ditch beside a hedge, matted with withered grass, strewed with blackened twigs of the hawthorn, and mottled with detached masses of the eggs of the frog. All the larger vegetables are resolved into as pure a coal as the plants of the Coal Measures themselves--the kind of data, doubtless, on which unfortunate coal speculators have often earned disappointment at large expense. None of the vegetables themselves, however, in the least resemble those of the carboniferous period.