Below this are Lower Miocene strata about 300 feet in thickness, in the upper part of which are twenty-six beds of lignite, clay, and sand, and at their base a ferruginous quartzose sand, varying in thickness from two to twenty-seven feet. Below this sand are forty-five beds of alternating lignite and clay. No shells or bones of mammalia, and no insect, with the exception of one fragment of a beetle (_Buprestis_); in a word, no organic remains, except plants, have as yet been found. These plants occur in fourteen of the beds—namely, in two of the clays, and the rest in the lignites. One of the beds is a perfect mat of the debris of a coniferous tree, called by Heer _Sequoia Couttsiæ,_ intermixed with leaves of ferns. The same Sequoia (before mentioned as a Hempstead fossil, p. 246) is spread through all parts of the formation, its cones, and seeds, and branches of every age being preserved. It is a species supplying a link between _Sequoia Langsdorfii_ (see Fig. 153, p. 238) and _S. Sternbergi,_ the widely spread fossil representatives of the two living trees _S. sempervirens_ and _S. gigantea_ (or Wellingtonia), both now confined to California. Another bed is full of the large rhizomes of ferns, while two others are rich in dicotyledonous leaves. In all, Professor Heer enumerates forty-nine species of plants, twenty of which are common to the Miocene beds of the Continent, a majority of them being characteristic of the Lower Miocene. The new species, also of Bovey, are allied to plants of the older Miocene deposits of Switzerland, Germany, and other Continental countries. The grape-stones of two species of vine occur in the clays, and leaves of the fig and seeds of a water-lily. The oak and laurel have supplied many leaves. Of the triple-nerved laurels several are referred to Cinnamomum. There are leaves also of a palm of which the genus is not determined. Leaves also of proteaceous forms, like some of the Continental fossils before mentioned, occur, and ferns like the well-known _ Lastræa stiriaca_ (Fig. 154, p. 238), displaying at Bovey, as in Switzerland, its fructification. The croziers of some of the young ferns are very perfect, and were at first mistaken by collectors for shells of the genus _ Planorbis._ On the whole, the vegetation of Bovey implies the existence of a sub-tropical climate in Devonshire, in the Lower Miocene period.