Although all these fruits belong to Genera whose leaves are pinnated, no fossil pinnated Palm leaves (as we have just stated,) have yet been found in Europe. It seems therefore most likely, from the mode in which so large a number of miscellaneous fruits are crowded together in the Isle of Sheppey, mixed with marine shells and fragments of timber, almost always perforated by Teredines, that the fruits in question were drifted by marine currents from a warmer climate than that which Europe presented after the commencement of the Tertiary Epoch; in the same manner as tropical seeds and logs of g mahogany are now drifted from the Gulf of Mexico to the Coasts of Norway and Ireland.
Besides the fruits of Palms, the Isle of Sheppey presents an assemblage of many hundred species of other fruits,[1] most of them apparently tropical; these could scarcely have been accumulated, as they are, without a single leaf of the tree on which they grew, and have been associated with drifted timber bored by Teredines, by any other means than a sea-current.
We have no decisive information as to the number of species of these fossil fruits; they have been estimated at from six to seven hundred.[2] In the same clay with them are found great numbers of fossil Crustaceans, and also the remains of many fishes, and of Crocodiles, and aquatic Tortoises.
- ↑ According to M. Ad. Brongniart, many of these have near relation to the aromatic fruits of the Amomum (cardomom,) they are triangular, much compressed, and umbilicated at the summit, which presents a small circular areola, apparently the cicatrix of an adherent calyx; within are three valves. A slight furrow passes along the middle of each plain surface, similar to that on the fruit of many scitamineous plants. These Sheppey fruits, however, cannot be identified with any known Genus of that Family, but approach so nearly to it, that Ad. Brongniart gives them the name of Amomocarpum.
- ↑ See Parkinson's Organic Remains, Vol. i. Pl. 6, 7. Jacob's Flora Favershamensis. And Dr. Parsons, in Phil. Trans. Lend. 1757, Vol. 50, page 396, Pl. XV. XVI. An immense collection of these fruits is preserved in the British Museum, another in the Museum at Canterbury, and a third in that of Mr. Bowerbank, in London.
