204 REMINISCENCES OF 



resided in France who had personally been pupils of 

 Brongniart, whose utterances were in their minds 

 infallible and unassailable. One of these was M. 

 Renault, of the Geological Museum of the Jardin 

 des Plantes at Paris, in whose care Brongniart's 

 collection of fossil plants was placed. The second 

 was my friend M. Grand' Eury, then a young but 

 -extremely able and energetic mining engineer, who 

 resided at St. Etienne, in the middle of one of the 

 most important of the coal-producing districts of 

 Central France. The third was the Marquis 

 de Saporta, a descendant of the old French noblesse, 

 who had been robbed of his ancestral possessions 

 during the Revolution, but who at a later period had 

 recovered some property and still resided in the 

 family chateau at Aix, in Provence. Each of these 

 observers was a voluminous writer, and their most 

 important works, especially those of MM. Renault 

 and Grand' Eury were in connection with the vegeta- 

 tion of the carboniferous age. The consequence 

 was that most of their writings teemed with attacks 

 upon the views that I was promulgating. Being in 

 friendly correspondence with all of them, I paid 

 little attention to their aggressive utterances, but 

 steadily persevered in my investigations, the results 

 of which were chiefly published in volume after 

 volume of the Philosophical Transactions, between 

 1872 and the present time, but now and then I fired 

 a broadside into the enemy's camp. At that time my 

 friend Professor Hartog of Queen's College, Cork, 



