PLANT ARCHEOLOGY. 269 



PLANT ARCHEOLOGY. 



Investigations in fossil botany are recondite and tech- 

 nical, the materials generally unattractive, and the results 

 unintelligible to the popular mind ; but in Count Saporta's 

 " Monde des Plantes," ^ and under his happy exposition, the 

 stony desert is made to rejoice and blossom as the Rose. The 

 interest which we take in the vegetation of former periods 

 is not so much geological as genealogical ; and this interest 

 diminishes with the distance from our own time and environ- 

 ment. We know nothing of the earliest plants — the begin- 

 nings of vegetable even more than of animal life are beyond 

 our ken ; no great satisfaction seems obtainable from the 

 small acquaintance that has been made with the plants which 

 flourished before the carboniferous period. And the botany 

 of that age, notwithstanding its wealth of Ferns and its adum- 

 brations of next higher types, impresses us as much with the 

 sense of strangeness as of wonderful luxuriance. For even 

 the fern-impressions, familiar as they may look to the unpro- 

 fessional observer, are outlandish. The more the critical stu- 

 dent knows of them the less likeness he finds in them, or in 

 the coal-vegetation generally, to any species or genera now 

 living.2 But in the vegetation of cretaceous, and still more 

 of tertiary times, familiar forms first come to view, and pedi- 

 grees may begin to be traced. Questions of ancestry touch 

 us more nearly than those of history ; so an enquiry into the 

 source and parentage of the plants with which man is asso- 

 ciated is more attractive than any question concerning the 

 origin of the pristine vegetation of the earth. Moreover, our 



^ Le Monde des Plantes avant V Apparition de V Homme. Par le Conite 

 de Saporta. Paris and New York, 1879. (The Nation, Nos. 742 and 

 743, September 18 and 25, 1879.) 



2 To those who wish to get a good coup d'ceil of this vegetation from 

 authentic records systematically arranged, we recommend the " Atlas to 

 the Coal Flora of Pennsylvania and of the Carboniferous Formation 

 throughout the United States,'' by Leo Lesquereux, an octavo volume of 

 eighty-seven double plates, just issued by the Second Geological Survey 

 of Pemisylvania. There is nothing else to be compared with it. 



