CHAPTER VII 



PALAEONTOLOGY 



WE have merely hinted at an outline of the branches 

 of study in the modern plants, but that outline suggests 

 the great extent of detail that must be offered to the 

 student by the thousands of living plants that have 

 already been named. The palseobotanist is faced by a 

 still vaster problem, for in the last thirty million years 

 or so, during which the world has been a comfortably 

 habitable place, the races of plants have never remained 

 the same, for each is altering, evolving, or " devolving " 

 (if the word may be used in a new sense) all the time. 

 Even at the present time it must be actually true, 

 though we so seldom observe its slow progress, that no 

 species is fixed and stationary for long together. Every- 

 thing is either evolving or dying out. A student of 

 fossil botany, therefore, has not only to consider all 

 the plants of any one given epoch, as has the modern 

 botanist, but he is concerned with series of vegetations 

 which differ more or less from each other according to 

 the length of time that separates them from each other. 



Of these it is probably not a wildly extravagant 

 estimate to say that twenty-nine thirtieths are extinct 

 species. If they* are extinct, that means that they are 

 no longer alive how then can they be studied ? 



If you walk along a shore to-day at high tide you 

 will find many fragments of land plants in the debris, 

 not only orange peel and banana skins brought by man, 



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