IV. The lignite of bovey tracey

The lignite of Bovey Tracey, in Devon, was fully described by Oswald Heer and Pengelly in these ‘ Transactions,' and there is no need to repeat their description. The conclusion Heer came to, from the study of the fossil plants (except a single beetle there were no other fossils), was that the deposit “must be referred to the Lower Miocene division and to the Aquitanian stage of it,” or as we should now put it, the strata were Upper Oligocene or, perhaps, Lower Miocene. Heer also considered it to be equivalent to the Hamstead Beds of the Isle of Wight, which we now know are somewhat earlier than the Aquitanian and are of Middle Oligocene date. Doubt has since been thrown on these conclusions by Mr. Starkie Gardner, who considered that the flora collected by Heer and Pengelly is identical with that of the Bournemouth Beds (Middle Eocene). Mr. Gardner appears to have made no collections at Bovey, and in his Bournemouth collections (now in the Museum of Natural History) we can find nothing to justify this statement. Perhaps this extreme view is somewhat modified by later changes in the identification of some of the plants.