Palaeozoic Fossil Plants. 221 



perfectly new flora appears in the Triassic era. Again, in 

 the Liassic epoch, we find other distinct vegetable forms, not 

 only in Europe, but in America and India, as will be seen by 

 consulting for the United States the memoirs published by 

 Prof. W. B. Rogers and myself on the oolitic coal-field of 

 Virginia, and for the east by the accounts given by Captain 

 Grant of the flora of the Cutch oolite.* If, on the other 

 hand, we reflect on the wide extent, in the present state of 

 the globe, of botanical provinces, each inhabited by its own 

 assemblage of plants, we must regard the Vosges as not far 

 distant from the Tarantaise Alps. Yet in the chain of the 

 Vosges in Alsace we find, even at the period of the Lower 

 Trias or Bunter, a vegetation wholly diff'erent from the car- 

 boniferous ; and the Keuper again, or Upper Trias, displays, 

 according to Adolphe Brongniart, another flora more ap- 

 proaching to the oolitic. What is still more decisive, in the 

 Department of the Isere, at no great distance from the 

 limits of the anthracite formation of the Alps, Jurassic strata 

 occur containing impressions of plants, which exhibit the 

 usual characteristics of the oolitic flora, and include no 

 Triassic, Permian, or Carboniferous species. 



Mr Bunbury admits that certain living ferns have a very 

 wide range in latitude, but still they offer no parallel in their 

 geographical distribution in space to the supposed range in 

 time of the anthracitic flora of the Alps ; for, in proportion 

 as each living species spreads farther and farther from its 

 point of departure or chief centre of development, it becomes 

 more and more mixed with the plants of other provinces. 

 Nowhere could the botanist point to a group of forty trees, 

 shrubs, or ferns flourishing at two remote points in the globe 

 unmixed with foreign plants, and separated by two or more 

 provinces of distinct species. 



That we may not underrate the real amount of the sup- 

 posed anomaly or exception to all ordinary rules, in the case 

 of the anthracitic flora of the Alps (assuming it to be of Ju- 

 rassic date), we must bear in mind that the beds containing 

 it are not simply regarded by M. E. de Beaumont as the 



* Quart. Jour. Geol. Soc, vol. v., p. 136. 



