CtEOLOUTCAL WOEIv in CANADA AND THE OLD WORLD. 3 



years, and describing and figuring from time to time in the Transactions of the Royal 

 Society. I was able to make many notes of these specimens, which I trust will be useful 

 in advancing the knowledge of this flora in Canada ; and I feel convinced that the facts 

 accumulated by Prof Williamson and those recently obtained by Grand'Eury and others 

 in France are rapidly placing us within reach of a comprehension of the affinities and 

 relationships of the plants of the coal period, much more accurate and definite than we 

 have heretofore obtained. Wliile new and unexpected conclusions may be reached on this 

 subject, I have reason to believe that many of the suggestions and anticipations, which I 

 have ventured to throw out with reference to the plants of the Nova Scotia coal-formation, 

 and which I haA'e based on facts of mode of occurrence as well as of structure, will be 

 verified and confirmed. More especially it will, I think, appear that there have been 

 grouped, under the general name of SigiUaria, plants of very different ranks ; while defi- 

 nite characters will be found to separate the greater part of the plants known as Cordaites 

 from the true conifers of the genera, Dadoxylon and Araucarites ; and the humble plants of 

 the group of Ehizocarps will be discovered to have been more important in the Palaeozoic 

 than has hitherto been supposed. 



The coal-field of Nova Scotia has alTorded a very remarkable group of terrestial 

 batrachians, not precisely paralleled elsewhere. But recently Fritsch has described, from 

 the so-called gas-coal deposits of the Permo-carboniferous of Bohemia, a niimber of very 

 similar forms, some of them belonging to the same genera with those of Nova Scotia. The 

 earliest known indications of Carboniferous Batrachians were the footprints discovered by 

 Logan at Hortou Bluff and described by me as Hi/Iopus Lognni; but we have not found 

 actual bones at so low an horizon. I saw, however, in the collections of Dr. Traquair in 

 Edinburgh, a skull of a large batrachian not yet described, from beds of the same age in 

 Scotland. 



The peculiar development of the Cretaceous and Laramie rocks in our Western Terri- 

 tories, the rich angiospermous flora which they contain, the insensible gradation upward 

 of the Cretaceous into the Tertiary, and the small relative development of the marine parts 

 of the formations, have given a special and exceptional character to these deposits. 

 Recent discoveries are, however, tending to assimilate the floras of the old and new 

 worlds in the Cretaceous epoch ; and in Great Britain, Mr. Starkie Gardner has recently 

 shown that the Eocene flora corresponds more nearly with that of America than had here- 

 tofore been supposed, and that certain floras formerly regarded as Miocene are really older.' 

 In this way much of the apparent discrepancy will be removed, and we shall probably be 

 no longer told by European palœobotanists that floras, which on stratigraphical grounds 

 or the evidence of animal fossils we know to be Eocene or Cretaceous, are in their estima- 

 tion Miocene. I had myself occasion to observe in the Cretaceous of the Lebanon, where, 

 however, the marine limestones are very largely developed, a formation with sandstones, 

 shales, and clays, containing shells of Ostreœ and nodules of ironstone, as well as fossil wood 



' Since writing the above, I observe that in a paper read before tlie British Association, Mr. Starkie Gardner 

 has somewhat incorrectly stated the position of Canadian geologists as to the lirst appearance of the Cretaceous 

 flora, which, as explained in my paper in the Transactions of this Society for last year, first presents Dicotyledo- 

 nous trees, not in the earliest Cretaceous, but in the Middle Cretaceous. Our Lowest Cretaceous holds a strictly 

 Mesozoic flora, so far as known. 



