as if split by heat into many fragments. Few pieces are more than from four to six feet in length; but a series of these may often be seen lying end to end for a space of from fifty to sixty feet, as if the tree they constituted had been sawn or broken across, the pieces remaining in their places. The aspect of the fallen trunks is like that of the half rotten bog-wood found in an Irish or a Scottish morass. In hue, they are for the most part of a lightish chesnut-brown; some of them of a dusky-white, precisely of the color of common ash or pine long exposed to the weather. Of this tint are nearly all the smaller fragments, which often lie about as if chipped off from the larger ones. There are no fangs of roots or branches connected with the stems, but there are the rudiments of both in abundance. The knots indicating where branches once had been, are often of singular beauty and distinctness; sometimes so much so, as to seem fresh torn off the stem. The whole scene is the very picture of solitude and desolation, enhanced beyond that of the ordinary Desert—which leaves no token of ever having been more productive than it is—inasmuch as the remains around remind you that what is now salt and barrenness must once have been fertility and verdure. The trees, as already said, are mostly on the surface; many of them, however, are half-buried, others barely show themselves above the sand. The sand itself is light colored; the nodules of stone intermixed with it are rounded; sea-shells everywhere abounding. Near the edge of the forest there are what resemble the dry beds of small-sized streams and torrents: here the little cliffs displayed are of very soft limestone, full of oyster-shells, so fresh and bright, that they seem scarcely at all affected by the weather. They are of the transparent kind, nearly flat, and scarcely thicker than common paper. Selenite here abounds, as generally over the Desert, where sea-salt prevails. It is here for the most part fibrous, the fibers being horizontal, and at right angles to the axes of the vein. I took nearly half a ton of specimens home with me; and these, like the whole of the rest of my collection, were carried free of charge both by the Egyptian Transit and Steam Navigation Company. They were afterwards distributed amongst various of our public museums.
As for the nature of the trees, they are not palms, as their branches show; nor am I aware that there is any living race nearly kindred to them. They are completely silicified, ring like cast-iron, strike fire with flint, and scratch glass. How has this transformation been effected? By no chemical process now known to man. We have nothing at all analogous to it either in the laboratory of the chemist or that of nature. There is no substance more indestructible than charcoal. Cut off from air, it resists the most intense heats known to us, and remains in the bowels of the earth unscathed for millions of years! Here the whole woody and carbonaceous matter has vanished, and its place we find silica—the earth of flints, a substance nearly insoluble, and by itself infusible by any heat we are acquainted with. Yet so quietly and perfectly has the exchange been effected, that for every atom of charcoal that has been displaced, an atom of flint has been left behind. Textures and tissues so minute, that the help of microscopes is required for their detection—that their delineation can only be attempted after they have been much magnified—are changed in substance, but in substance only: the most minute and fragile of their forms remain as when the green leaves and bright blossoms drew their
