RECENT PROGRESS IN THE STUDY OF 

 BRITISH CARBONIFEROUS PLANTS 



By E. A. NEWELL ARBER, MA., F.L.S., F.G.S. 

 Trinity College, Cambridge ; University Demonstrator in Paleobotany 



The British School of Fossil Botany, which in recent years 

 has become probably the largest numerically in the world, 

 continues to gain adherents, and, as the result of its labours, 

 an ever varied series of fresh facts is being added to our know- 

 ledge of both the form and structure of the plants of the past. 

 In the present paper it is proposed to enumerate the additions 

 which have been contributed quite recently on the subject of 

 Carboniferous plants. In the main the activities of the British 

 School have lain in this direction, though much important work 

 on both British and Foreign Mesozoic and Tertiary floras has 

 also been published. 



The studies under consideration naturally fall into two 

 classes, for it is but rarely that a memoir is equally concerned 

 both with the external morphology and the internal anatomy 

 of the same plant. We will therefore first notice those dealing 

 with petrified plant remains, in which the internal structure 

 is preserved. 



The " present position of Palaeozoic Botany," as it stood 

 some three years ago, is fully defined in the masterly article 

 published by Dr. Scott (48) x in 1906 in the first number of 

 the Progressus Rei Botanicce. Some account will also be 

 found of the quite recent advances in our knowledge, so far as 

 the petrified fossils are concerned, in the second edition of 

 the same author's Studies in Fossil Botany (52). Lady Isabel 

 Browne (17) has also contributed a detailed, critical resume, 

 of great interest and importance on our present knowledge of 

 the phylogeny and inter-relationships of the Pteridophyta. In 

 the present instance no attempt will be made to summarise our 

 knowledge on a similar scale, we will content ourselves with 



1 Full references to all the memoirs quoted will be found in the Bibliography 

 on p. 146. 



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