SOME BOTANICAL PROBLEMS THAT PALEOBOTANY 

 HAS HELPED TO SOLVE 



ARTHUR HOLLICK 



Museum of the Slaten Island Association of Arts and Sciences 



Among the savants whose investigations in connection with the 

 vegetable kingdom have earned for them the distinction of having 

 their names graven on the walls of the laboratory building of the 

 Brooklyn Botanic Garden are four to whom paleobotany lays claim, 

 at least in part — Adolf Theodore Brongniart, Leo Lesquereux, Oswald 

 Heer, and Marquis Gaston de Saporta- — and it is my privilege briefly 

 to outline some of the botanical problems which they and other paleo- 

 botanists have helped to solve. 



Paleobotany, as a science, is much younger than botany. Living 

 plants were noticed, studied and classified long before fossil plants 

 had received any serious attention. In fact it was only a little more 

 than a century ago that fossil plants began to be recognized as the 

 probable actual remains of former living plants. 



The science of paleobotany may be said to have been born in 1804, 

 when Ernst Friedrich, Baron von Schlotheim, issued his Beschreibung 

 Merkwiirdiger Kraiiter-Abdriicke und Pflanzen-Versteinerungen : ein 

 Beitrag zur Flora der Vorwelt, generally known and cited as Schlot- 

 heim's Flora der Vorwelt, in which he discusses the prevailing theories 

 in regard to the nature and origin of fossils, or "petrifactions" as they 

 were commonly called at that time, and uses the following epoch- 

 making words: "... and more recent observations and investigations 

 have even led us to the very probable supposition that they may be 

 the remains of an earlier so-called pre-Adamic creation, the originals of 

 which are noiv no longer to be found. ... In the continued investiga- 

 tion of this subject this opinion, with certain restrictions, has in fact 

 gained a high degree of probability with the author of the present 

 work, so that he ventures to announce his treatise as a contribution 

 to the flora of the ancient world." 



In the light of what we know and take for granted today this 

 statement sounds strangely elemental in connection with a work of 

 that nature; but in reality it represented an expression of the most 

 advanced thought of the period when it was issued, and to Schlotheim 

 should be given the credit for having laid the foundation upon which 



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