Medical and physical researches, or, Original memoirs in medicine, surgery, physiology, geology, zoology, and comparative anatomy / by R. Harlan.

  • Harlan, Richard, 1796-1843.
Date:
1835
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medical and physical researches, or, Original memoirs in medicine, surgery, physiology, geology, zoology, and comparative anatomy / by R. Harlan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    Phytolithites. In North America there is no lack of material in this department of our subject; but all the information we possess relative to the fossil plants of this country, is dis- seminated in the various works devoted to natural history. Our fossil vegetables are confined to no family in particu- lar, but consist, as far as yet discovered, of the pine, oak, hickory, walnut, beech, palms, ferns, reeds, grasses, mosses, algae, peat, and lignite in various stages of carbon- ization. Dicotyledonous lignite is of common occurrence in the deep cut of the Chesapeake and Delaware canal. Numerous popular accounts of submerged forests and petrified trees in scattered localities, will be found in the American Journal of Science and Arts, and occasional notices of similar phenomena in Hitchcock's Geology, and the Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences, &c. &c. The following remarkable account of a petrified forest, is extracted from a letter of G. H. Crossman, of the United States Army, published in the Illinois Magazine, during the summer of 1830: i( The enclosed specimen was broken off from one of the many large stumps and limbs of trees, found near Yellow Stone river, Missouri territory, and brought away by some of the officers attached to the Yellow Stone ex- pedition in 1815. The most remarkable facts, perhaps, with regard to these petrifactions, of what was once a forest of thick timber, are their location and abundance. For a distance of twenty or thirty miles over an open high prairie, upon the west bank of the Missouri river, and a few miles be- low its junction with the Yellow Stone, near latitude 48°, these remains are most abundant. The topography of this section of the country is hilly, and much broken into deep ravines and hollows. On the