126 Ehrenberg’s Discoveries—Notices of Eminent Men. 
with Count Bray (afterwards Bavarian minister at various courts,) 
a man of letters, and a distinguished botanist. Count Sternberg 
also cultivated botany, and became an active member of the Bo- 
tanical Society of Ratisbon. During the time that Germany was 
a prey to the miseries of war, he retired to his hereditary country 
seat Brzezina, in the circle of Pilsen, in the northwestern part of 
Bohemia. Here his attention was early drawn to the coal forma- 
tion, of which mineral he possessed an extensive estate at Radnitz. 
He soon formed the intention of publishing representations of the 
fossil vegetables belonging to the coal strata. These had already 
‘begun to excite the attention of geologists. Some of these works, 
containing notices on such subjects, preceded the existence of 
sound geology, as the Herbarium Diluvianum of Scheuchzer, 
the Sylva Subterranea of Beutinger, and the Lapis Diluvii Tes- 
tis of Knoor.* At the beginning of the present century, Faujas 
de St. Fond had published in the Annales du Muséum some im- 
pressions of leaves, not indeed belonging to the coal, but to a later 
formation. 'These impressions were examined and determined 
by Count Sternberg, in the Botanical Journal of Ratisbon, if 
1803. In the following year appeared the first truly scientific 
work on this subject, the “ Fora der Vorwelt’”’ of Schlotheim, @ 
which the great problem which was supposed to demand a solu 
tion was, Whether the vegetables of which the traces are thus eX 
hibited belong to existing or to extinct kinds? Count Sternberg 
was in Paris when he received the work of Schlotheim, and he 
studied it carefully by the aid of the collections which exist 2 
that metropolis. He published in the Annales du Muséum a 20 
tice on the analogies of these plants, but concluded with observ 
ing, that a greater mass of facts was requisite; and that, these 
once collected, the general views which belong to the subject 
would come out of themselves. 
Bearing in mind this remark of his own, when fortune, after the 
storming of Ratisbon in 1809, set him down in the midst of the 
great coal formations of Bohemia, he proceeded forthwith to man 
age the working of his mines, so as to preserve as much as po* 
sible the most remarkable impressions of fossils. Combining his 
Sh orale ee ie 
_* To the earlier works on this subject we may add Martin’s Petrificata —_ 
sia, published 1809; and Parkinson’s Organic Remains, (1804,) which conta 
many plates of vegetables. 
re 
ee 
