214 THE GEOLOGICAL SUEVEY 



three essays on the Coal plants, which involved both the draw- 

 ing of woodcuts and personal superintendence of slicing and 

 polishing fossils. These essays were printed in the * Memoirs ' 

 of the Geological Survey for 1848 ; two dealt with the structure 

 of Stigmaria and Lepidostrobus ; the third drew a general 

 comparison between the plants of the Coal and of the present 

 day. Here microscopic examination of these sections of 

 * coal-balls ' was made fruitful by his great knowledge of living 

 forms ; he was able to demonstrate the actual structure of the 

 fossils, and as Professor W. W. Watts remarks in his Anniversary 

 Address to the Geological Society, 1912, * these memoirs differ 

 from all others on the subject published at the time or, indeed, 

 long afterwards in receiving unstinted praise alike from 

 geologists and from botanists.' 



Except for a return in the eighties to the * enigmatic ' 

 Pachytheca, on which he first published in 1853, Hooker's short 

 but brilliant work on fossil botany ended with his explanation 

 of Trigonocarpon, a fossil fruit of the Coal measures (in 1854-5). 

 India and Kew absorbed his energies, though his early interest 

 was not quenched. True that for many years the rashness of 

 geological identifications led him to dub Fossil Botany * the 

 most unreliable of sciences ' ; ' but,' adds Professor Watts, 

 ' when, in recent years, the study of Carboniferous, Jurassic, 

 and Cretaceous plants yielded such new and startling results 

 to investigators in this country, France, Germany, and the 

 United States, all his old enthusiasm returned.' 



The other part of his winter occupations in 1846-7 included 

 completion of the Antarctic Flora and the Niger Flora, which 

 had grown too bulky for printing more than the opening part 

 in the * Journal of Botany.' * I have had,' he complains, * to 

 write something rather " Flowery, Bowery " for a Botanist, 

 to please the " Emancipators," but it is not very much, happily.' 

 The Galapagos Florula was to appear in the Linnean Society 

 Transactions, and to be followed with notes on the botanical 

 distribution of the flora. Another task was the naming of 

 all his own and K. Gunn's Tasmanian Compositae and Coni- 

 ferae, with publication of diagnoses of the many new species 

 in the Journal, for the prospects of bringing out the Tasmanian 



