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countries ? Even animals are seldom seen in sufficient numbers to give a character 

 to the landscape, and their restless perpetual motion removes them from 

 our view ; but trees affect us by their magnitude and stabOity, flowers by the 

 beauty of their colours, and herbs by the freshness of their verdure. 



At a meeting where learned, acute, and experieaced naturalists long 

 inured to investigation are assembled together, I should like to take a 

 wider view than the mere enumeration of plants now growing upon these 

 rocks, or on the confines of the Malvern country. I should wish, if it was 

 possible, to connect past with present vegetation, and excite geological as well 

 as botanical interest. But it is impossible fully to do so here ; and even to 

 go back only to those times that we all acknowledge, when a strait or channel 

 swept through the vale of "Worcester, from the Mersey to the Devonshire 

 coast, thus isolating Wales — when of course numerous littoral plants must 

 have then lined the shore -it is only in the Longdon Marshes that the Scir^us 

 mantinius yet existing, gives us an indication of a former maritime Flora, and 

 perhaps the abundance of (Enanthe pimpindloides near Forthampton and 

 Powick. I have, indeed, gathered the Sea Storks-bill (Erodium maritimum) 

 here in years past, perhaps another trace of sea- shore vegetation, but that 

 is now gone by the intrusion of donkeys at the habitat where it grew. 

 To penetrate backward into the arcana of fossil vegetation is a difficult task, 

 and almost beyond the reach of botanical effort — in fact, so uncertain is 

 the diagnosis of fossilised plants that, except generally as to fucoids and ferns 

 in the secondary deposits, I much doubt whether many other plants there 

 can be certainly identified ; for the coal vegetation has given rise to very 

 discordant opinions as to what it consists of, and even roots have been con- 

 sidered as distinct plants. Yet if zoologists can trace life from its lowest 

 forms in ancient deposits to the grander consummation of mammalian animals 

 of later date, it might be supposed that vegetation had something like a 

 connecting chain to show, linking the past to the present. The tertiary beds 

 have, especially on the continent, indeed, presented beautifully preserved 

 leaves, from which the families to which they belonged have been educed ; 

 and this has led to the remarkable conclusion adopted by Dr. Seeman and 

 other able botanists, that the present flora of Australia very much resembles 

 what was the characteristic vegetation of Europe in tertiary times, and that it 

 is a remnant of that vegetation which was kept in existence by progressing 

 from Europe in the direction of Australia, The general forms of Australian 

 vegetation such as the Banksiae and the leather-leaved Eucalypti have more 

 affinity with the relics of tertiary vegetation than with the living forms now in 

 Europe or eLsewhere. Admitting this, then, without necessarily following up 

 Dr. Seeman's argument, that this vegetation, which includes so few edible fruits, 

 was insufficient to sustain human life if any then existed, or at any rate any 

 large population, then comes the question, from whence arose the present 

 vegetation around us, and is it derivable from any ancient source ? I infer that 

 vegetation has been always migratory from certain centres of creation, and that 



