306 THE JOURNAL OF BOTANY 



illness. After lie had taken the second part of the Natural Sciences 

 Tripos in Botany and Geology, he was nominated in 1899 by 

 T. McKenny Hughes, Woodwardian Professor of Geology, to a 

 Demonstratorship in Palseobotany — a post which he held until his 

 death nineteen years later. His scientific output, which is entirely 

 included within this period, was concerned in part with recent plants, 

 but more largely with paliBobotanical problems. The geological 

 aspect of his work has been considered, with a bibliography, by tbe 

 present writer in the Geological Magazine (Dec. vi. vol. 5, p. 426, 

 1918), so it Avill be unnecessary to refer to it here. In a " Sketch of 

 the History of Palseobotany," at which Ai-ber was working at the end 

 of his life, he gives reasons for dating the " Modern " period of his 

 science from 1870. Since he himself bappened to have been born in 

 this year, his life may be said to have been practically coincident with 

 the first half -century of progress in modern palseobotany. 



The majority of Arber's papers dealt witli the systematic botany 

 of bygone geological ages, the material on which they were based 

 being largely those "impressions" in which the internal structure of 

 the plants is no longer preserved. He put unstinted labour into this 

 kind of work, for he realized that systematic and descriptive studies 

 constitute " the necessary foundations on which everything palseo- 

 •botanical is built." He greatly regretted that botanists often seem 

 scarcely aware of the existence of palseobotany except on its ana- 

 tomical side. Arber was keenly alive to the importance of the 

 anatomy of fossil plants, and he occupied himself with it whenever 

 opportunity arose ; e. g. in his studies of the type specimens of 

 Lyginodendron oldhainium (Camb. Phil. Soc. 1902) and of the roots 

 of Medullosa (Ann. Bot. 1903) and in his joint work with Hamshaw 

 Thomas on Sigillaria (Phil. Trans. 1908). But he never lost sight 

 of the fact that— since only a minute proportion of the palseo- 

 botanist's material is preserved in the form of petrifactions from 

 which thin sections can be prepared — it would be fatal to narrow the 

 science down to the sphere of anatomical studies. " Impressions " 

 must always constitute our main source of information regarding the 

 floras which have clothed the surface of the earth in successive geo- 

 logical epochs. 



Among Arber's earlier contributions to systematic palagobotany 

 was his Monograph of the Glossopteris Flora, which was published as 

 one of the British Museum Catalogues in 1905. He Avas always 

 interested in the palseobotany of the Southern Hemisphere, and, among 

 other work on the subject, he described a collection of fossils from 

 the Triassic and earlier rocks of New South Wales (Q. J. G. S. 1902) 

 and certain Jurassic plants from Western Australia (Geol. Surv. W. 

 Aust. 1910). His chief work on this line, however, was a memoir on 

 the earlier Mesozoic Floras of New Zealand, recently published by the 

 New Zealand Survey (1917). But the greater number of his papers 

 related to the Carboniferous floras of Great Britain, to which he 

 devoted many j^ears' work in field and museum. Several of his 

 memoirs on this subject appeared in \\\ii Philosophical Transactions— 

 that on the Culm Measures of N.-W. Devon (1904), the Forest of 

 Dean Coalfield (1912), the Wyre Forest Coalfield (1914), and the 



