Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/383

Rh   COPROLITES (from /coVpos, dung, i0os, stone), the fos silized excrements of extinct animals. The discovery of their true nature was made by Dr William .Buckland, who observed that certain convoluted bodies occurring in the Lias of Gloucestershire had the form which would have been produced by their passage in the soft state through the intestines of reptiles or fishes. These bodies had long been known as &quot;fossil fir cones&quot; and &quot;bezoar stones.&quot; Buckland s conjecture that they were of faecal origin, and similar to the album grcecum or excrement of hyaenas, was confirmed by Dr Prout, who on analysis found they consisted essen tially of calcium phosphate and carbonate, and not unfre- quently contained fragments of unaltered bone. The name &quot;coprolites&quot; was accordingly given to them by Buckland, who subsequently expressed his belief that they might be found useful in agriculture on account of the calcium phosphate they contained. The Liassic coprolites are described by Auckland as resembling oblong pebbles, or kidney-potatoes; they are mostly 2 to 4 inches long, and from 1 to 2 inches in diameter, but those of the larger Ichthyosauri are of much greater dimensions. In colour they vary from ash- grey to black, and their fracture is conchoidal. Internally they are found to consist of a lamina twisted upon itself, and externally they generally exhibit a tortuous structure, produced, before the cloaca was reached, by the spiral valve of a compressed small intestine (as in skates, sharks, and dog-fishes) ; the surface shows also vascular impressions and corrugations due to the same cause. Often the bones, teeth, and scales of fishes are to be found dispersed through the coprolites, and sometimes the bones of small Ichthyo sauri, which were apparently a prey to the larger marine saurians. Coprolites have been found at Lyme Regis, en closed by the ribs of Ichthyosauri, and in the remains of several species of fish ; also in the abdominal cavities of a species of fossil fish, Macropoma Mantelli, from the chalk of Lewes. Professor Jager has described coprolites from the alum-slate of Gaildorf in Wiirtemberg, assigned by him to the Keuper formation ; and the fish-coprolites of Burdiehouse and of Newcastle-under-Lyme are of Carboni ferous age. The so-called &quot;beetle-stones&quot; of the coal-forma tion of Newhaven, near Leith, which have mostlya coprolitic nucleus, have been applied to various ornamental purposes by lapidaries. The name &quot;cololites&quot; (from KWOV, the large intestine, At $os, stone) was given by Agassiz to fossil worm- like bodies, found in the lithographic slate of Solenhofen, which he determined to be either the petrified intestines or contents of the intestines of fishes. The bone-bed of Axmouth in Devonshire and Westbury and Aust in Gloucestershire, in the Penarth or Rhsetic series of strata, contains the scales, teeth, and bones of saurians and fishes, together with abundance of coprolites ; but neither there nor at Lyme Regis is there a sufficient quantity of phos- phatic material to render the working of it for agricultural purposes remunerative. The term coprolites has been made to include all kinds of phosphatic nodules employed as manures, such, for example, as those obtained from the Coralline and the Red Crag of Suffolk. At the base of the Red Crag in that county is a bed, 3 to 18 inches thick, containing rolled fossil bones, cetacean and fish teeth, and shells of the Crag period, with nodules or pebbles of phos phatic matter derived from the London Clay, and often investing fossils from that formation. These are distin guishable from the grey Chalk coprolites by their brownish ferruginous colour and smooth appearance. When ground they give a yellowish-red powder. These nodules were at first taken by Professor Henslow for coprolites ; they were afterwards termed by Buckland &quot; pseudo-copr elites.&quot; &quot; The nodules, having been imbued with phosphatic matter from their matrix in the London Clay, were dislodged,&quot; says Buckland, &quot; by the waters of the seas of the firtt period, and accumulated by myriads at the bottom of those shallow seas where is now the coast of Suffolk. Here they were long rolled together with the bones of large mammalia, fishes, and with the shells of molluscous creatures that lived in shells. From the bottom of this sea they have been raised to form the dry lands along the shores of Suffolk, whence they are now extracted as articles of commercial value, being ground to powder in the mills of Mr Lawes, at Deptford, to supply our farms with a valuable substitute for guano, under the accepted name of coprolite manure.&quot; The phosphatic nodules occurring throughout the Red Crag of Suffolk are regarded by Mr Prestwich as derived from the Coralline Crag. The Suffolk beds Lave been worked since 1846; and immense quantities of coprolite have also been obtained from Essex, Norfolk, and Cambridgeshire. The Cambridgeshire cop rolites are believed to be derived from deposits of Gault age : they are obtained by washing from a stratum about a foot thick, resting on the Gault, at the base of the Chalk Marl, and probably homotaxeous with the Chloritic Marl. An acre yields on an average 300 tons of phosphatic nodules, value 750. About 140 per acre is paid for the lease of the land, which after two years is restored to its owners re-soiled and levelled. Plicatulse have been found attached to these coprolites, showing that they were already hard bodies when lying at the bottom of the Chalk ocean. The Cambridgeshire coprolites are either amorphous or finger-shaped ; the coprolites from the Greensand are of a black or dark brown colour ; while those from the Gault are greenish-white OB the surface, brownish-black internally. Samples of Cambridgeshire and Suffolk coprolite have been found by Voelcker to give on analysis phosphoric acid equivalent to about 55 and 52 - 5 per cent, of tribasic calcium phosphate respectively (Journ. R. Agric. Soc. Eng., vol. xxi. p. 358, 1860). The following analysis of a saurio-coprolite from Lyme Regis is given by Herapath (ibid. vol. xii. p. 91):—

Water 3 976 Organic matter 2 - 001 Calcium sulphate 2 - 026 Calcium carbonate 28 121 Calcium fluoride not determined. Calcium and magnesium phosphate 53 996 Magnesium carbonate 423 Aluminic phosphate 1 276 Ferric phosphate 6 182 Silica... .. 0733 98734

An ichthyo-coprolite from Tenby was found to contain 15 4 per cent, of phosphoric anhydride. The pseudo-copro- lites of the Suffolk Crag have been estimated by Herapath to be as rich in phosphates as the true ichthyo-coprolites and saurio-coprolites of other formations, the proportion of P 2 5 contained varying between 12 5 and 37 25 per cent., the average proportion, however, being 32 or 33 per cent. Coprolite is reduced to powder by powerful mills of peculiar construction, furnished with granite and buhr- stones, before being treated with concentrated sulphuric acid. The acid renders it available as a manure by converting the calcium phosphate, Ca 3 P 2 O 8, that it contains into the soluble monocalcic salt, CaH 4 P 2 O a, or &quot; superphos phate.&quot; The phosphate thus produced forms an efficacious turnip manure, and is quite equal in value to that produced from any other source. The Chloritic Marl in the 