Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Department of
Date of this Version
7-1892
Citation
Botanical Gazette, Vol. 17, No. 7 (Jul., 1892), p. 223
Abstract
The great flat slab on which we stood seemed built there to command a view of stoneworts. In the clear lime water of Fall River, S. D., floated great streamers of Chara, fresh and green, yet fading insensibly, first into a dingy, then into a dead looking, and even into a stony mass, as the eye followed it up stream. It was a streamer of living, growing stoneworts that blended into the slabs of "petrified moss" strewn broadcast in the channel around us, and on one of which we stood. But the eye could trace this so-called living fossil or petrifaction back still further to the banks overhead, where other stoneworts once floated in waters whose channel was higher than and broader than now. Yet higher still, in an earlier channel, the eye could see great slabs of it, upturned in a railroad cutting.