531 



CHAPTER XXII. 



THE DEVONIAN PERIOD— Continued. 

 FLORA OF THE DEVONIAN. 



The state of our knowledge of this subject at the time when tlic 

 writer commenced his labours upon it, may be learned from the fol- 

 lowing extract from his paper of 1861, already referred to : — 



" The known flora of the rocks older than the Carboniferous system 

 has until recently been very scanty, and is still not very extensive. 

 In Goeppert's recent memoir on the flora of the Silurian, Devonian, 

 and Lower Carboniferous rocks,* he enumerates twenty species as 

 Silurian, but these are all admitted to be Alga?, and several of them 

 are remains claimed by the zoologists as zoophytes, or trails of worms 

 and mollusks. In the Lower Devonian, he knows but six species, 

 five of which are Alga?, and the remaining one a Sigillaria. In the 

 Middle Devonian he gives but one species, a land plant of the genus 

 Sagenaria. In the Upper Devonian the number rises to fifty-seven, 

 of which all but seven are terrestrial plants, representing a large num- 

 ber of the genera occurring in the succeeding Carboniferous system. 



" Goeppert does not include in his enumeration the plants from the 

 Devonian of Gaspe, described by the author in 1859,f having seen 

 only an abstract of the paper at the time of writing his memoir, nor 

 does he appear to have any knowledge of the plants of this age 

 described by Lesquereux in Rogers' Pennsylvania. These might 

 have added ten or twelve species to his list, some of them probably 

 from the Lower Devonian. It is further to be observed, that certain 

 specimens found in the Upper Ludlow of England,} appear to prove 

 the presence of Lepidodendron in that formation ; and that, in the 

 paper above referred to, I have noticed specimens from the Gaspe 

 limestone which seem to me to indicate the occurrence of PsilophyLun 

 and Noeggerathia or Cordaites in the Upper Silurian of Canada. 



* Jena, 1860. 



f Journal of Geological Society of London, also Canadian Naturalist. 



| Murchison's "Siluria," p. 152, Journal Ucul. Soc. vol. iv. 



