LIXNKAN SOCIETY OF LOXDOX. 37 



feeling is expressed in his Address to the Royal Society in 1877. 

 After referring to Lesquereux's work on Cretaceous and other 

 fossil plants of the United States, he says : " In the whole range 

 of the natural sciences no study is so difficult and at the same 

 time so fruitless, if we regard the amount of results accepted by 

 botanists, as compared with the prodigious labour their acquisition 

 by palaeontologists has demanded;' This discouraging remark 

 refers, however, essentially to work based on external characters, 

 especially on those of fossil leaves — his bete noir. In the same 

 Address he follows with interest the progress of American fossil 

 botany as hearing on distribution, and points out that in North 

 America there is no break between the Upper Cretaceous and 

 Lower Tertiary floras. He returns to the subject in his Royal 

 Society Address of the next year, 1878, in which he discusses with 

 sympathy Saporta's theory of the Polar origin of vegetation. 



In an Address to the Geographical Section of the British Association 

 in 1881, Hooker again refers to the discovery in Arctic latitudes of 

 fossil plants whose existing representatives are to be found only in 

 warm temperate regions, and discusses the bearing of them on the 

 history of the Flora of North America. This subject was one which 

 specially ajipealed to him from its immediate bearing on the great 

 questions of Geographical Distribution to which his best work was 

 devoted. 



During his later years Hooker followed the rapid progress of 

 fossil botany with a most sympathetic interest, which was very 

 kindly shown in some of his letters to me. In a letter of Oct. 3, 

 1896, acknowledging a copy of my Address to the Botanical 

 Section at Liverpool, he said : " Your Fossil Botany pages, of course, 

 interest me most and very much indeed." This, and other passages 

 show that, with all his severity of judgment, he had a specially 

 friendly feeling for the study of fossil plants. Perhaps his most 

 interesting letter in this connection was one written on receiving 

 the preliminary communication by Prof. F. W. Oliver and myself 

 on the seed of Lyijinodendron, which, it may be remembered, was 

 identified in the first instance by the glands on the cupule. He 

 wrote (June 13, 1903) : " I must write to thank you for sending 

 me the Proceedings R. S. with your and Oliver's paper on Lygino- 

 dendron, which has interested me more than I can express. What 

 can be the meaning of the capitate glands ? they would seem to 

 indicate the cotemporaneous insect-lifo which I think has been 

 demonstrated to exist in the Coal Measures. Has any one accounted 

 for the quantity of pollen-grains in the sac of the ovule of 

 Cycadese ? so many more than the wind is likely to have brought." 



As regards the last suggestion some light is thrown on tho 

 difficulty by Prof. Pearson's observations on the insect-visitors of 

 some South African (Jycads. As regards the fossils the abundance 

 of pollen in the ovule is equally remarkable, and Hooker's remark 

 may here also give us a clue to the right explanation. 



In a later letter (Oct. 6, 1906) he spoke of our " knowledge of 



