NOTES ON THE PRESENT STATUS OF PALEOBOTANY 



EDWARD WILBER BERRY 



Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md. 



Paleobotany aims to understand the succession of floras that 

 have existed on the globe, their composition, evolution, and 

 distribution. The science of botany becomes then the study 

 of the flora of but one geological period, the present, while paleo- 

 botany is the study of the floras of all geological periods. Tax- 

 onomy and morphology combined will eventually supply ade- 

 quate data for phylogeny, or the completion of the natural system 

 of plants, the ultimate goal. 



Our knowledge of nearly all the great groups would be very 

 one-sided if we knew only their end products in the existing 

 flora. To the Thallophyta and Bryophyta the fossil record 

 has furnished but meager data beyond showing that the former 

 are exceedingly old and were never very different from what they 

 are today, while the latter are apparently absent except in com- 

 paratively recent geological times. Hence it is extremely un- 

 likely that paleobotany will ever shed any light on the ancestors 

 of vascular plants. 



The Sphenophyllales, generalized types extinct since the Pale- 

 ozoic, represent the end product of the ancestral stock which 

 earlier gave rise to the Equisetales and more remotely to the 

 Lycopodiales. We know of the existence of the Pseudoborniales, 

 which are intermediate between the Sphenophyllales and the 

 primitive Calamites, but need a knowledge of their internal struc- 

 ture. We also need impressions showing the character and habit 

 of those supposed Sphenophyllum-like plants which bore the 

 structural cones known as Cheirostrobus. We have had much 

 anatomy of the Botryopteridae or so-called Primofilices and 

 would welcome the correlation of a large number of genera 

 founded upon petiolar anatomy with material showing the exter- 



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THE PLANT WORLD, VOL. 15, NO. 8, AUGUST, 1912 



