ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS.

Rien ne se ressemblait moins que les deux sœurs entre clles. Thecla, les yeux et les chevaux noirs, la taille haute et élancée, avait le caractère altier, l'humeur vive et coquette, l'imagination plus ardente que le cœur. Eudoxie avait pour ainsi direc l'âme blonde comme les cheveux; ses yeux bleu étaient doux et voilés comme son cœur; un tendre nuage de mélancolie semblait envelopper son front et son esprit; ses devoirs étaient ses premiers plaisirs. Tout exci-zel's German Literature, and others. In French you may read Telemaque, tait les vœux de Thécla; un rien contentait ceux d'Eudoxie. Sans doute Eudoxie soupirait un peu de l'austérité de sa vie auprès de M. Offenheim,10 mais, il lui avait été légué par sa tante," et elle ne comprenait pas pour elle-même un autre bonheur que de le rendre moins malheureux.

8

HENRY FLETCHER: We are much gratified by the expression of your good opinion, and deeply regret our inability to comply with your request. J. W-Y: We like your prose much better than your poetry. STUDENT: Inquire of a mathematical instrument maker. ELLIVAS (Stepney): Good German works are Schiller's, Goëthe's, Klopstock's Messiah, Undine, Lessing's Fables, Schwabe's Poems, Tieck, MenGil Blas. La Fontaine's Fables, Voltaire's Charles XII., Montesquieu, Racine, Corneille, Molière, Thierry, Thiers, Guizot, Louis Blanc, Daubigné, etc. We cannot assist you in the other matter. Probably some optician might furnish you with the information you want.

PUPIL: Pronounce Latin as if it were English, observing the rule we gave with regard to accent, and making final e a distinct syllable, thus-a-mór-e, not a-more. To know whether a syllable is long or short, you must look in the dictionary, or gradus; or, still better, read and scan (i, e. divide into feet) a good deal of poetry.

LITERARY NOTICES.

Thécla, au contraire, supportait avec impatience un pareil assujettissement,12 et ses rêves ne tendaient qu'aux moyens possibles de s'en affranchir." C'était presque toujours Eudoxie qui soutenait les pas du vieillard, qui lui faisait de saintes et intéressantes lectures,14 et qui lui chantait les airs qu'il préférait, les vieux airs de sa jeunesse. 15 Elle était admirable de soins, de gaieté, de courage, et M. Offenheim avait retrouvé des larmes pour pleurer sa jeune épouse ;16 c'était une grande joie pour Eudoxie.-Thécla au contraire, avait presque toujours quelque bonne raison pour n'être pas In Two Parts:-1. Latin and English. 2. English and Latin. By J. R. près de M. Offenheim; il s'en apercevait bien,18 mais il ne s'en plaignaits jamais; il était trop bon, et aussi trop content de son Antigone-Eudoxie, qui trouvait d'ailleurs, mille excuses afin d'expliquer l'absence de sa sœur.19

17

Quelques mois étaient à peine écoulés, qu'il se présenta un riche mariage pour Eudoxie,20 mais il fallait quitter le château d'Offenheim,21 et ce mariage fut refusé. Au premier moment, Thécla en avait conçu beaucoup de jalousie. Belle et brillante comme elle était, voir sa sœur cadette recherchée ainsi avant elle, son orgueil en souffrit cruellement; depuis ce jour-là, elle ne cessait d'écrire à Dresde,22 aux connaissances qu'elle y avait contractées pendant les dernières années où l'on recevait tant de monde à Offenheim, Enfin, un matin arriva un courrier qui lui apportait la nouvelle qu'elle était nommée lectrice et demoiselle d'honneur de la reine.23 Vite, elle porta la lettre à sa sœur, qui lui dit seulement: Et la promesse au lit de mort de notre tante? Thecla sans se déconcerter répondit: J'ai promis que je ne me marierais qu'à la condition de rester auprès de M. Offenheim..... Mais ce n'est pas pour me marier que je e quitte..... Ainsi.....

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This curious and interesting work contains the Travels and Discoveries of Herodotus, Pausanius, and others, in Egypt, the East, &c.; the History of America, by MARY HOWITT; the History of Greece, by J. GODKIN, Esq.

complete Chronological Tables, etc. etc.; with a profusion of curious and unique Engravings.

The tree ferns which grow in the present day belong to the circumstances, they retain the rounded form of their original tribe of plants called Polypodiaceae. When the fronds of this structure; but their cylindrical bark, now carbonised, has class of ferns fall off, they leave upon and along the surface of been filled with sand, which has hardened, and which, when the trunk scars or cuts, just like those which are found mark-removed, presents a cast of the inward structure. ing the fossil Caulopteris, which were also occasioned by the decay of the leaf-stalks.

The fern tribe must have been very abundant and rank in the coal period, for very nearly 300 species have been enumerated as coal fossils. This is remarkable when it is considered that the whole of Europe, in its present vegetation, furnishes only fifty indigenous species.

4. SIGILLARIA.-There is perhaps no plant in the coal formation of so much importance as the Sigillaria. It derives its name from the beautiful and well-defined impressions which are made upon it, and which seem as if they had been produced by a Sigillum, the Latin for seal. Most of the coal trees belonged to this class, of which sixty different species have been discovered and determined.

These Sigillariæ are found in all coal shales in every part of the globe. They grew in lofty stems of from forty to fifty and even to seventy feet high, in cylindrical trunks from one to five feet in diameter, their surface fluted, and generally without branches. Botanists have determined that the Sigillariæ belonged to the family of cone-bearing trees, akin to the fir, etc., and that in their internal organisation they are related to the species called Zamia and Cycadea.

Amid the layers of the coal shales, the Sigillariæ are frequently found in the form of long, flat, narrow slabs of a coaly substance, with both surfaces fluted in the line of their length. These fluted surfaces are marked and ornamented with rows of distinct and deep figures, all of which are disposed with perfect regularity. These are stems of Sigillaria flattened by the weight of overlying beds. The inside of their wood seems to have decayed very rapidly. On this account they have become hollow, and consequently, when they have been thrown down lengthwise in the mud, they were the more easily flattened by the pressure from above. The appearance of the different kinds of Sigillariæ is represented in fig. 18.

5. STIGMARIA.-You have already been told that the under clays, which form the floor of the coal seams, contains a vegetable fossil called Stigmaria, and that it contains no other fossil. These Stigmariæ are always found in their natural form, and branching out through the muddy shales in all directions. Geological botanists were a long time in determining the real character of these fossil plants, and it was not till their regular position under the coal seams was ascertained, that a clue was given to the discovery that they were the roots of the tree called Sigillaria. Before this, they were supposed to be aquatic plants, or floating shrubs, which settled in the mud, and were afterwards covered over by the continued succession of deposits.

The discovery that Stigmaria was the root of Sigillaria was made by Mr. Binney, in the coal-works at St. Helen's, near Liverpool, where both were in immediate contact, as root and stem, as represented in fig. 19.

The

When Stigmaria is called the root of the Sigillaria, it is meant that it is its rhizome, a term which botanists use for a root-like stem creeping horizontally, more or less covered with earth, like those of the elm in thin soils, and giving off buds and rootlets like the specimen D in fig 19. bodies of these roots are, as the illustration shows, of a cylindrical form, which, in length, are from a few inches to many feet, and in circumference from ten to twelve inches. There have been instances in which the roots spread themselves to the distance of sixteen feet. Some of these roots, as is seen in D, put forth rootlets, which were fitted on, to tubercles that were in the bark, spirally around each root. In D, you see some of these rootlets attached above and below, and the circular markings are the small pits left by the dropping off of the rootlets; and in c you are presented with the symmetrical structure of those markings. When a specimen of Stigmaria is broken across, a small circular body or core, represented by the inward circle and black spot on the right end of D, is found; and the more it is traced, the more clear is it that this core or axis extends the whole length of the stem, and yet it is very rarely in the centre, but generally on one side of the root. Fig. 18. Sigillariæ. B

In the Sigillaria Oculata, the fluting of the stem is very distinct, and the imprints or little pits marked on the surface look like the eye of an animal, and hence its name. The Sigil

A

varia Voltzii has an outward lamination like bark, that has its appropriate markings, and that separate from the inner surface, whose impressions differ from the outward one. This difference is exhibited in the lower and the upper parts of the specimen в in the wood-cut. The Sigillaria Elegans, c, has a woody system, divided into long hexagonal or six-sided plates, which are dotted with circular pits.

Sometimes the Sigillaria is found in the coal measures in an oblique or upright position, just as the tree grew. This is represented by in our engraving of the coal forest. In these

6. LEPIDODENDRON.-This term means the scaly tree, and it is called "scaly" from the scars which are left on the stem by the falling off of the leaf-stalks. The Lepidodendron's form of growth is represented by BBB in our engraving of the coal forest. These trees grew to the height of from twenty to about fifty feet. In Jarrow Colliery, near Newcastle-uponTyne, a specimen, forty-nine feet long, was found lying in layers of shale prostrate along the line of lamination.

Specimens of the fruit of the Lepidodendron have been discovered in several coal-fields. These are elongated bodies,

like a cucumber, and have been called fossil cones. Geologists call this fruit Lepidostrobus, which is a Latin compound for scaly cone. This fruit is often found to have formed the nucleus of the concretion called clay-iron-stone. In this concretion, the form of the fruit is well preserved, exhibiting a conical core or body, covered all around with innumerable scales, enclosing sporangia, or the spores of the plant.

7. EQUISETUM and CALAMITES. The Equisetum, or the Calamites [ca-la-mi-tes], is a reed-like fossil plant, much akin to the Horsetail, which grows in marshy places. Its stem is cylindrical, furrowed and jointed, not unlike that of Tree Sigillaria, c, in fig. 17. The tallest horsetail in our present marshes in Europe grow only two or three feet high, and even the Equisetum giganteum of the tropics of South America, only about five feet, with a stem of about an inch in diameter; but during the epoch of the Coal Formation, these Calamites had the dimensions of trees-twenty or thirty feet high.

The stems of the Calamites are frequently found crushed and flattened, which implies that they grew hollow. They appear to have had a bark which could be easily separated from the wood. Fifty-one different species of Calamites have been determined, and what used to be called the leaves and the branches of those plants have been ascertained to be their

plant, or the star-leaf. This graceful plant is represented by
D in the engraving of the coal-forest, and which appear to
grow under the shade of the Lepidodendra of that wood-cut.
9. CLUB-MOSSES. The Club-mosses are small herbaceous
plants that grow among brushwoods and in bogs, and their
leaves grow over one another, as in the lettuce-plant. In the
present vegetation of the earth, there are about two hundred
species of club-mosses, which abound most in tropical climates,
where one species grows even so high as three feet. These
mosses, however, in the coal period grew to be gigantic plants,
or rather trees, like the largest firs, and formed a dense and
extensive forest, under the shade of which grew the lesser
ferns and mosses.

II. COAL SHELLS AND FISHES.

In some of the gritty sandstones and clayey shales associated with the coal measures, but especially in the beds of the Mountain Limestone, many remains have been found of animated organisms.

1. The Mountain Limestone is rich in zoophytes or animal plants, and in corals of several species. Entire beds of this rock are frequently formed of swarms of Crinoidea, or lilyshaped plants.

A, The trunk of a Sigillaria in contact with B, the Stigmaria, as its root. c, A fragment of Stigmaria, with its eyelet markings, magnified. D, A piece of Stigmaria ficoides.

roots. The vast abundance of them in the coal measures indicates that they constituted an essential part of the flora of the coal period.

The exposure of the coal measures has often presented sections which exhibited the stems of the Equiseta in an erect position, the very attitude in which they grew. They have been thus seen by Mr. Binney in the Lancashire coal-fields, and by Sir Charles Lyell at Pictou, in Nova Scotia; but one of the most remarkable of such sections is the one seen by M. Alex. Brogniart [Brón-yar] in the coal-works of St. Etienne, near Lyons, in France, and which is exhibited in fig. 20.

This engraving teaches us many important geological lessons. First: that the different beds of micaceous sandstone gathered, in the form of mud, around these stems while they were growing. Secondly: the different elevations at which the bottoms of these stems are found show that the plants grew at different elevations, and that, consequently, we have here a succession of submerged forests. Thirdly. the continuity of some of the stems being broken or pushed to one side, indicates that, after the sandstone beds had been hardened, a sliding movement took place in the strata.

8. ASTREOPHYLLITES. The Asterophyllites are slender plants, which are called by this name because their leaves radiate about like the rays of a star-the star-like-leaved

2. The shells of the coal series amount to about three hundred different species, some of which are microscopical. Of these fossil shells, some are of fresh-water origin, and others-the majority-are of sea growth, while a third class is of brackish water. The fresh-water and the brackish water shells are found in the grits and clays of the coal measures, and have been called the mussel-bands. In the neighbourhood of Shrewsbury there is a gritty deposit, formed probably in brackish water, and generally supposed to be the newest member of the coal series, that is characterised by a small bivalve shell like a Cyclas, and by a diminutive Cypris. At Cape Breton, in Nova Scotia, also the strata associated with the coal seams have various shells, such as Cypris, Unio, Modiola, and Spirorbis, all of which are indicative of brackish water.

In some cases, an intercalation of fresh-water and sea shells is found. Thus, in the Edinburgh coal-field, the remains of sea fishes are found associated with the Cypris, a brackish water shell, like that of the Shrewsbury bed. In Yorkshire, also, the fresh-water beds contain the shells of the Unio; and yet, in the midst of this series, there is an extensive bed abounding in fishes and in marine shells. In the Coalbrook Dale coal-fields, the strata have afforded forty or fifty species of terrestrial plants, and also about forty species of shells, of which two or three are allied to the fresh-water Unio, and the

A, Horizontal beds of sandstone, traversed by erect trunks of tree-like bamboos or Equiseta. B, Coal shales with impressions of plants. c, Shales with nodules of clay-iron-stone. D, A layer of sandstone.