May I, 1879] 



NATURE 



II 



eocene floras that are met with in England, Iceland, 

 Greenland, Spitzbergen, and Grinnell Land, and that 

 from Heer's miocene standpoint no uniform increase 

 could do so, his eight columns of reply do not embrace 

 this question. 



4. The total absence of any characters among the 

 piants themselves, which would preclude their being 

 considered eocene. 



To this I must also await an answer until eocene floras 

 are better understood. Heer's reply contains none. 



It is obvious that if he has no more to say than this, the 

 balance of the evidence, even as it stands, is already 

 actually against him. But it is far more conclusive than 

 I have represented it to be in the above summary. 



We are told to believe that enormous deposits, many 

 thousand feet in thickness, vast in extent, and resting 

 everywhere conformably on the latest cretaceous beds, 

 and indeed stratigraphically indistinguishable from them, 

 are not as we should expect, in greater part at least — the 

 next succeeding older tertiaries, but the miocene. We are 

 not to question the reaUty of the marvellous gap thus 

 created ; not to point out that climatic considerations are 

 entirely against the miocene age of the beds ; not even to 

 suggest that the plant evidence relied upon quite fails to 

 support it ; for Heer, like an infallible Pontiff, has, on 

 plant evidence, pronounced them miocene. 



He has tried to excommunicate me in his concluding 

 paragraph, of which the following is but a feeble transla- 

 tion : — " The incorrect assertions and conclusions of Mr. 

 Gardner proceed from want of knowledge or disregard 

 of well-ascertained and solid facts, and it is much to be 

 desired that those who occupy themselves with such 

 difficult questions should first acquaint themselves with 

 the facts before they express upon them such positive 

 opinions." 



I, however, to use a quotation, do not feel " one penny 

 the worse." 



The miocene hypothesis, which is not a scientific one, 

 and would have been gladly overturned by Belt, rests en- 

 tirelyuponHeer'sinterpretationof the plants. I havethere- 

 fore, I presume, but to show how completely unreliable 

 in this case Heer's interpretation is, to break the spell of 

 infallibility attaching to his work and to reopen the ques- 

 tion for solution by scientific thought — " the application of 

 past experience to new circumstances, by means of an 

 observed order of events," as Clifford put it. In the first 

 place, what are the "well-ascertained and solid facts" of 

 Heer ? I have looked at the Bovey Tracey beds formerly 

 described, and erroneously, as miocene by Heer. Taking 

 the ferns, with which I am just now most familiar, I find a 

 form described as Pecopteris lignitum, and this species 

 was at the time no doubt a " solid fact ; " but I subse- 

 quently find Heer describes this same fern as Aspidium 

 iignitum ' and, extraordinary to relate, as Dryandra 

 rigidaP' Are these soHd facts ? Because he how speaks 

 of the species as an Osmunda. I might analyse Heer's 

 " solid facts " to a considerable extent, but refrain from 

 doing so until the proper time arrives, in the pages of the 

 Palasontographical Society. In the meantime I cannot 

 but consider that his caution might more justly be applied 

 to himself ; for whilst I, at least, have had access to all 

 Heer's published facts, I expressly stated that those I 

 chiefly relied upon were unpublished.^ I therefore marvel 

 that he should have written so positively on so difficult a 

 question without first, at least, endeavouring to acquaint 

 himself with the latest facts. 



Heer either does not possess, it appears, the know- 

 ledge requisite to separate stages of the eocene from the 

 miocene, or he misapplies it. Of all the floras he has 

 described but one is for him, eocene, and about this he ex- 



" Sachsisch-thiiringischen Braunkohknflora," 1861, pi. ix. f. 2. 

 » L.C., pi. X. f. ,3. 

 ' In course o. putlication by the Palxontographical Society. 



presses the greatest doubt. This single "great work"' 

 on the eocene, as he calls it, was no larger than could be 

 amply illustrated in ten not over-crowded plates, for I find 

 the same species doing duty on more than one under 

 different names. Beyond this he only claims to have 

 studied the flora of Monte-Bolca, although he has pub- 

 lished nothing upon it, and to have seen " many plants 

 of the English eocene." Of the Monte-Bolca flora I can 

 say little, as when I have been to Verona, where, I 

 beliere, large collections exist, the curator has been 

 absent ; but of the latter I can say that Heer's "many" 

 must be used in a limited sense, for when he yisited 

 England, before either Mitchell or myself had com- 

 menced collecting, the collections open to him were 

 meagre indeed. 



Although, however, Heer modestly claims to have 

 described but one eocene flora, I believe credit is due to 

 him for describing several. Among these the mo^ 

 familiar to us is that of Bovey Tracey, lithologically and 

 pateontologically precisely resembling some of the middle 

 eocene beds of Bournemouth, only ^eighty miles distant 

 from it.2 Heer may, of course, deny their eocene age, 

 and I cannot convince him by letting him see the speci- 

 mens, as I did Ettingshausen, who, after being shown 

 leaves, fruits, seeds, and spines, said the matter must be 

 considered doubtful unless I could produce Sequoia 

 Couttsia from Bournemouth. This, on looking through 

 the cabinet of conifers, we found in abundance, not only 

 from Bournemouth, but also from Alum Bay. This is but 

 one instance selected from near home. If we look at 

 Heer's tables in the third volume of his " Flora Tertiaria," 

 we see that all the floras of France, Germany, Austria, 

 Italy, and Switzerland are called miocene. The floras of 

 Sotzka, Hiiring, Monte Promina, &c., although eocene to 

 those who described them, are not so to Heer. He, in 

 fact, persistently misrepresents the relative importance of 

 the eocene and miocene formations, which he has always 

 reversed, almost ignoring, indeed, the existence of the far 

 more important of the two. Fortunately, accident has 

 given to me what it has denied to Heer after a Ufe of 

 study, that is, access to large series of undoubted middle 

 eocene plants ; for my own collection, from Bournemouth 

 alone, cannot numberless than 10,000 selected specimens. 

 These plants reveal how closely many of Heer's so-called 

 lower miocene floras assimilate to the eocene, to which 

 age they doubtless belong, and that forms thought to be 

 characteristic of the former are really only met with in 

 the latter, and that other species, ranging through both, 

 are misleading and negative, so far as affording evidence 

 upon this question. Of course Heer could not be ac- 

 quainted with the unpublished English floras, and un- 

 fortunately their publication must be a work of time ; 

 but why, for example, in opposition to Unger and 

 Ettingshausen, did he maintain the Sotzka, Haring, and 

 Monte Promina floras to be miocene. 



" When next you view, 

 Think others see as well as you." 



is the moral of a fable with which Heer seems un- 

 acquainted. 



I know that in very many cases what is lower miocene 

 to Heer, is lower or middle eocene to me, and that there- 

 fore his lower miocene floras are practically and truly 

 my middle or at latest upper eocene floras. There is thus 

 a great difference of opinion between us, for the one 

 nomenclature often implies immense gaps, which the other 

 fills up. 



While Heer's opinions of the ages of his localised floras 

 are mostly based upon the evidence of the plants them- 

 selves, and the beds in which they are found contain 

 little or no internal evidence, apart from this, of the 

 formations to which they belong — those upon which I am. 



' " Der sachsisch-thiiringischen Braunkohlenfl.ra," Berlin, 1861. 

 * Ceol. Ma^., April, 1879. 



