SOME BOTANICAL PROBLEMS THAT PALEOBOTANY 
HAS HELPED TO SOLVE 
ARTHUR, HOLLICK 
Museum of the Staten 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 Théodore 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 now 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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