i 111.^1 l-ss.vNs l\ HI I.D-WOKK 



real desire for knowledge, he seeks to ascertain wh.> 

 their affinities living vegetation of to-day 



reading, by visiting museums, and by careful observation 

 along the hedgerows or in botanic gardens, he endeavours 

 to realise what the leaves and stems, which he finds in t he 



stone, really * . waved bright and green 



ID tlu- air long ages ago. The information he can glean 

 as to their probable botanical grade and habit, leads him 

 to re-examine, with greater care, the circumstances i. 



He finds, perhaps, that 



they occur more particularly in one stratum, which we 

 shall suppose consists of thin leaves or laminar of a kind 

 of hardened day. It is on splitting up these lamina: 

 that he unfolds the fossil plants. Ka< h layer seems 

 vrrol with impressions of leaves, sterns, fruits, 



.or parts of the ancient vegetation ; Inn the fossils 



are all fragmentary, though well preserved. They remind 



him of the sheddings of trees after some early autumnal 



frost ; the fine layers of hardened silt, on which they lie, 



the laminae of mud which he has observed in the 



m of a |x>nd or dried-up pool ; and in the end, he 

 ules with some confidence that his fossil h 



.in was once the floor of some inland sheet of water, 



which the leaves of the neighbouring woodlands 

 were periodically shed. If he has ascertained that the 



- arc more nearly allied to those of a warmer region 

 than the vegetation now flourishing in the local r 

 allows himself to speculate on the probability that a 

 warn, once prevailed in his own country 



The remains of animals, however, are immensely more 

 abundant among the rocks than those of plants. The 



