The Evolution of Botany. 189 



dicotyledonous plants, determined the gymnospermous 

 character of the Coniferca and Cycadacece, and studied the 

 nature of the fructification of the ovary through the pol- 

 len. 



To this period (beginning of the nineteenth century) be- 

 longs also the origin of geographical botany, due to the work 

 of A. v. Humboldt, while Schouw, \\Tahleiiberg, Meyen, A. 

 De Candolle, Grisebach, Hooker, Boissier, Asa Gray, etc., 

 developed this department. These men studied the geo- 

 graphical distribution of plants and the effects of climatic 

 changes, about which they wrote several books, the works 

 of Grisebach being foremost. 



The paleontology of the vegetable kingdom, the study of 

 the fossil remains of ancient vegetable life, began to be pur- 

 sued about this time by Brongniart, Unger, Goppert, Sap- 

 porta, A. Gray, and others. Brongniart, in one of his works 

 his best one occupies himself with the history of vegetable 

 fossils ; in another he gives a systematic grouping of all the 

 species known to him, with their probable history from pre- 

 historic times. To this he added a chronological view of the 

 periods of vegetation and different floras in their successive 

 appearance upon the earth as far as that was possible. Sap- 

 pprta, a pupil of the former, worked in the same field, giving 

 his attention mainly to phytopaleontology. He wrote a num- 

 ber of works in which he accorded much value to the Dar- 

 winian theory, especially in his Evolution of the Vegetable 

 Kingdom. 



Goppert was one of the most ardent workers in this de- 

 partment of botany ; he had made a very large collection of 

 fossil plants which he compared in many works with the 

 same species of to-day, bringing the Darwinian theory of 

 transmutation to bear fruit. The formation of coal-beds" was 

 also a subject of his study. Goppert's Index Paleontologi- 

 cum, a classification of all known fossil plants, with complete 

 synonymic, published in 1850, is still the best work of its 

 kind. 



Structural and systematic botany, the latter more espe- 

 cially, enjoyed a goodly share of attention in the present 

 century by a host of botanists, among whom Asa Gray and 

 A. Wood rank foremost among the Americans. (See So- 

 ciology, p. 339.) 



By the rapid advancement of the various departments of 

 botany, they of necessity were made to occupy the rank for- 

 merly held by descriptive botany, although the latter was 



