PALEOBOTANY BEERY. 291 



ance of the Mosaic cosmology and a world but 6,000 years old is borne 

 in mind. Subsequently, when the differences in the fossils became 

 apparent, they were thought to represent forms still existing in the 

 Tropics that had been swept to Europe and buried by the waters of 

 the flood. When with the progress of knowledge of tropical plants 

 this last view became untenable, it was thought that the fossils rep- 

 resented plants that had been exterminated by the flood, and from 

 this it was but a slight step to the opinion advocated by Volkmann, 

 which appealed to many, that the antediluvian vegetation was of a 

 far higher order than that of the present with none of the thistles or 

 other weeds of modern times, and that our modem forest trees are 

 the degenerate descendants of delightful Adamitic fruit trees — a 

 phytological fall paralleling and ascribed to the fall of man. 



Gradually it came to be recognized that fossil plants were not only 

 unlike recent ones, but that they were very ancient and not merely 

 antediluvian but pre-Adamitic — a view first advocated by Blumen- 

 bach (1700). The first year of the nineteenth century saw the pub- 

 lication of the Beitrage zur Flora der Vorwelt by Ernst Friedrich 

 von Schlotheim (1761-1832), in which 11 plates of fossil plants were 

 published, and these plants were segregated into 5 classes and 12 

 orders which were based upon the method of preservation. The next 

 work of importance, with a somewhat different point of view as its 

 title indicates, was the Yersuch elner geognostisch-botan/schen Dar- 

 stellung der Flora der Vorwelt, published in parts from 1820-1838 

 b}^ Kaspar Maria von Sternberg (1761-1838). The vegetation of the 

 world was divided into three periods — an older insular period char- 

 acterized by the coal plants; a period marked by cycadean types, 

 which corresponds roughly with the modern Mesozoic; and a period 

 introduced by fucoidal remains and characterized by dicotyledonous 

 leaves, which corresponds with the modern Cenozoic. 



The real Nestor of paleobotany, however, was Adolphe Theodore 

 Brongniart (1801-1876), the son of Alexandre, who was associated 

 with Cuvier in his great work on the Paris Basin. Brongniart com- 

 menced publishing on fossil plants at the early age of 21, and in 

 1828, in his Prodrome to the Histoire des vegetaux fossiles, he drops 

 the prevailing point of view and treats fossil plants as none the less 

 plants, endeavoring to fit them into the natural system of classifica- 

 tion of Jussieu, and recognizing the true position of the gymnosperms 

 a generation or more before the students of the modern conifers ar- 

 rived at the same point of view. Brongniart maintained that there 

 had been a steady progress from lower to higher forms. He believed 

 in a gradually ameliorating climate, and divided the extinct vegeta- 

 tion into four periods, the first extending from the beginning to the 

 end of the Carboniferous, the second corresponding to the early Tri- 

 assic (gres bigarre), the third including the later Triassic, the Juras- 



