Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 73.djvu/130

126 fossil in America, and it was appropriately transmitted for study to Mrs. Britton of the New York Botanical Garden, the best authority on American mosses. It may now be seen in the great Botanical Museum in Bronx Park.

Flowers and fruits are quite numerous in the shale, though, unfortunately, nearly always detached from the plants, so that they can not be correlated with the leaves. Some of them are very well preserved and easily recognizable; others, even though reasonably perfect, have puzzled all the botanists who have examined them. One curious specimen is a bean pod, with most of the beans still in it, but one just in the act of falling out. Grass-seeds are often found, and we have one which had just begun to sprout when it was overwhelmed by a fall of ash.