The Hyopotamus belongs to the hog tribe, or the same family as the
Anthracotherium, of which seven species, varying in size from the hippopotamus
to the wild boar, have been found in Italy and other part of Europe associated
with the lignites of the Lower Miocene period.
LIGNITES AND CLAYS OF BOVEY TRACEY, DEVONSHIRE.
Surrounded by the granite and other rocks of the Dartmoor hills in Devonshire,
is a formation of clay, sand, and lignite, long known to geologists as the Bovey
Coal formation, respecting the age of which, until the year 1861, opinions were
very unsettled. This deposit is situated at Bovey Tracey, a village distant
eleven miles from Exeter in a south-west, and about as far from Torquay in a
north-west direction. The strata extend over a plain nine miles long, and they
consist of the materials of decomposed and worn-down granite and vegetable
matter, and have evidently filled up an ancient hollow or lake-like expansion of
the valleys of the Bovey and Teign.
The lignite is of bad quality for economical purposes, as there is a great
admixture in it of iron pyrites, and it emits a sulphurous odour, but it has
been successfully applied to the baking of pottery, for which some of the fine
clays are well adapted.
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