THE STORY TOLD BY FOSSIL PLANTS 

 By Edward Wilber Berry 



Professor of Palaeontology, The Johns Hopkins University 



Students of evolution are at present interested almost 

 exclusively in experimental studies that may disclose its 

 causes, an extremely difficult problem even with the simplest 

 and most rapidly multiplying organisms. Such studies, how- 

 ever, afford the only logical approach to an answer to the ques- 

 tion "Why?" The answer to the question "How?" is given 

 best in the geological record. Paleobotany — the science of the 

 world's oldest plant life — has this advantage over all other 

 methods of finding an answer to this question: the student, 

 to borrow a simile from written history, is dealing with the 

 original documents in so far as they are preserved — the fossil 

 plants — and he finds them in their actual order of succession. 

 Our main task here, then, is simply to tell the story of the 

 procession of the myriad of plant forms across the stage of 

 the past. Before that story is told, however, the general 

 facts and principles illustrated by fossil plants may be very 

 briefly set forth. 



First among these is the fact that plants underwent a 

 gradual transformation from simplicity to complexity and 

 were differentiated in both structure and habit in successively 

 higher groups, thus exemplifying the universal principle 

 of evolution. The earliest plants grew in the water, but 

 gradually tlie main theater of plant operations was trans- 

 ferred to the land. 



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