140 Morphology BOOK i 



association was met with in Argentina, and described by 

 him in 1895. Feistmantel wrote an important memoir 

 of the fossil plants of Cape Colony in 1889. In 1898 

 Amalitzky found indications of this flora intermixed 

 with northern types in beds of the Upper Permian age in 

 Russia. 



This flora, which was named by Neumayr in 1887 the 

 Glossopteris Flora, after its most prominent genus, seems, 

 therefore, to have been abundant in Australia, and over 

 the hypothetical continent of Permian times which stretched 

 across from India to South Africa, and South America. 

 This continent was the Gondwana Land of Suess. 



Little more than impressions of the fronds of the plants 

 have been found, leaving their exact affinities an open 

 question. In 1885 Tenison-Woods found in the Sarawak 

 coalfield of Borneo the fossil named Vertebra/rid which 

 Zeiller has shown to be the rhizome of Glossopteris. 



A comprehensive account of the fossil flora of the Lower 

 Gondwanas was published by Feistmantel during the 

 years 1879-86, and a good account of the Glossopteris flora 

 as a whole was published by Arber a few years after the 

 close of the century. 



When we turn to consider the progress of knowledge as 

 to the several groups of plants, it becomes evident that 

 our acquaintance with the Palaeozoic floras of the past was 

 in 1900 still largely confined to the plants of the Upper 

 Devonian and Carboniferous times, though, as we shall see 

 later, the general character of the Mesozoic flora, and its 

 distribution, in recent years received much attention. The 

 majority of the published records of the Algae were 

 proved to be untrustworthy. A fossil discovered by Dawson 

 in 1856 and referred by him to the Gymnosperms under 

 the name Prototaxites, was re-examined by Carruthers in 

 1872, and shown to be an Alga, having affinities with the 

 larger Siphoneae. He renamed it Nematophycus. A doubt- 



