I may be here permitted to mention, that in a little volume, written in reply to a widely known and very ingenious work on the Development hypothesis, I described and figured this unequivocally genuine lignite, in order to show that a true wood takes its place among the earliest terrestrial plants known to the geologist. I at the same time mentioned,--desirous, of course, that the facts of the question should be fairly stated, whatever their bearing,--that the nodule in which it occurred had been partially washed out of the fish bed in which I found it, by the action of the surf; and my opponent, fixing on the circumstance, insinuated, in the answer with which he honored me, that it had _not_ belonged to the bed at all, but had been derived from some other formation of later date. He ought, however, to have taken into account my further statement, namely, that the same nodule which enclosed the lignite contained part of another fossil, the well marked scales of _Diplacanthus striatus_, an ichthyolite restricted, like the Coccosteus (a specimen of which occurred in a neighboring nodule), to the Lower Old Red Sandstone exclusively. If there be any value whatever in palæontological evidence, this Cromarty lignite must have been deposited in a sea inhabited by the Coccosteus and Diplacanthus. It is demonstrable that, while yet in the recent state, a Diplacanthus lay down and died beside it; and the evidence in the case is unequivocally this, that in the oldest portion of the oldest terrestrial flora yet known, there occurs the fragment of a tree quite as high in the scale as the stately Norfolk Island pine, or the noble cedar of Lebanon.