428 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



present to the world a clear idea of the vegetation of the Cretaceous land, 

 scarcely known to science until elucidated by him. It developed that in 

 Heer's time, among the fossil plants found in Spitsbergen alone were 7 

 ginkos, 8 pines, a short bamboo, 7 poplars, 3 maples and a fossil 

 strawberry. 



Dr. Nansen was fortunate in securing the co-operation of Prof. A. 

 G. Nathorst in the examination of the fossil plants collected in Franz 

 Josef Land, as he has devoted much time to the flora, present and past, 

 of various portions of the Arctic regions, especially Spitzbergen and 

 King Charles Land. Nathorst had the advantage of the notes of New- 

 ton, J. H. Steele and R. Curtis on the fossils of Franz Josef Land, pub- 

 lished in the Quarterly Journal of Geological Science, London, vols. 

 53-54, 1897-1898. 



Most unfortunately, the fossils were very fragmentary, the leaves 

 in themselves small and often indistinguishable in color from the rock, 

 so that their examination was made almost entirely under the magnify- 

 ing lens. While the organic substance of the plants was sometimes still 

 to be seen in a soft, brownish variety of rock, yet the harder yellowish 

 varieties offered only impressions, or cavities, their organic substance 

 having entirely disappeared. In cross fractures there were sometimes 

 cavities which were complete transverse sections of coniferous leaves. 



There were twenty-nine species, of which the entire number are con- 

 iferous except one fungus, one fern, two palms and one uncertain. 



Nathorst says: "The plant-bearing strata of Franz Josef Land, which 

 are yet known to us, all belong, with the exception of those from Cook's 

 Eock and Cape Stephen, the age of which is still uncertain, to the upper 

 Jurassic, or the transition beds to the cretaceous, while as yet no tertiary 

 strata have been discovered." 



In geological age, while the Franz Josef flora resembles most the 

 previously known Jurassic floras of Siberia and Spitzbergen, yet Na- 

 thorst considers the geological age different, and naturally places it be- 

 tween the two, it being evidently younger than that of Siberia. 



It is interesting to note that Doctor Koettlitz found in an isolated 

 basalt nunatak (rock or hill protruding from a glacier) fossil plants 

 similar to those found by himself and Nansen on the north side of Cape 

 Flora. These nunatak plants, which Koettlitz believed to be in situ, 

 are identified by Nathorst as Upper Jurassic, and came from an eleva- 

 tion variously estimated as from six hundred to seven hundred and fifty 

 feet above the sea. 



Nansen agrees with Koettlitz in believing that tree-trunks found by 

 them, charred into charcoal or partly silicified, chiefly belonged to 

 conifers growing on the soil over which basalt flows were discharged 

 during the Upper Jurassic or Lower Cretaceous age, and that they have 

 been charred by a flowing mass of lava that overwhelmed them. 



