658 OSWALD HEER. 



plants, and sent them by tons to Zurich, — but from all parts of the 

 world, collections yerfe pressed upon him, and his wliole time and 

 strength were given to their study. In this way he became interested 

 in the Arctic fossil flora, of which he became the principal investigator 

 and expounder. His first essay m the domain which he has made so 

 {teculiarly his own was in a paper on certain fossil plants of Vancouver 

 Island and British Columbia, published in I860 ; and in 18G8 he 

 brought out the first of that most important series of memoirs upon 

 the ancient floras of Arctic America, Greenland, Spitzbergen, Nova 

 Zenibla, Arctic and Subarctic Asia, etc., which, collected, make up 

 the seven quarto volumes of the Flora Fossilis Arctica. The seventh 

 volume of this monumental work was brought to a conclusion only a 

 few months before the author's death. 



Ileer's researches into the fossil botany of the tertiary deposits were 

 very important in their bearings. They made it certain that our 

 actual temperate floras round the world had a common birth-place at 

 the North, where the continents are in proximity ; they essentially 

 identified the direct or collateral ancestors of our existini; forest trees 

 which flourished within the Arctic zone when it enjoyed a climate 

 resembling our own at present ; and they leave the similarities and the 

 dissimilarities of the temperate floras of the Old and the New World to 

 be explained as simple consequences of established facts. Thus Heer 

 himself did away with his own hypothesis of a continental Atlantis 

 by bringing to light the facts which proved that there was no need of 

 it. And, while thus justifying the ideas which had been brought 

 forward m one of the Memoirs of the American Academy (in 1859) 

 before these fossil data were known, he was not slow to adopt and to 

 extend the tentative views which he had confirmed.* 



A list of Ileer's scientific publications is given in the Botanisches 

 Centralblatt, No. 5, for 1884. They are seventy-seven in number, 

 besides the seven quarto volumes of the Flora Fossilis Arctica, which 

 comprise a considerable number of independent memoirs. These 

 works make an era in vegetable paleontology. Their crowning gen- 

 eral interest is that they bring the vegetation of the past into direct 

 connection with the present. 



Although he lived to a good old age, and was never inactive, Heer 

 was for most of his life an invalid, suffering from pulmonary disease. 

 For the last twelve years his work was carried on at his bedside or 



* The first and second volumes of the Flora Fossilis Arctica appeared 

 in 1HG8-71. " Sequoia and its History," in whicii tlie earlier view was extended 

 and made clearer, and Ileer's results noted, was publislied in 1872. 



