CH. IV] PRESERVATION OF PLANTS 57 



plants upon cole- slate, the knowledge of which, 

 I must confess myself to leave to my learned and 

 ingenious friend Mr Edward Lhwyd of Oxford.... He 

 told me that Mr Woodward, a Londoner, shewed 

 him very good draughts of the common female fern, 

 naturally formed in cole.... But these figures are more 

 diligently to be observed and considered... Dr Wood- 

 ward will have them to be the impressions of the 

 leaves of plants which were there lodged at the time 

 of the Deluge '(31). 



The Mr Woodward alluded to by Ray thus 

 expressed his views on fossils in an Essay towards 

 the Natural History of the Earth : — ' The whole 

 terrestrial globe was taken all to pieces and dissolved 

 at the Deluge, the particles of stone, marble, and 

 all solid fossils dissevered, taken up into the Avater, 

 and then sustained together with sea shells and other 

 animal and vegetable bodies ; the present earth 

 consists and was formed out of that promiscuous mass 

 of sand, earth, shells, and the rest falling down again, 

 and subsiding from the water ' (32). 



In the later part of the seventeenth century 

 Steno, a Dane by birth and Professor of Anatomy at 

 Padua, by his recognition of the identity of the teeth 

 in a shark's head, which he had dissected, with some 

 fossils from Malta known as Glossopetrae, established 

 the true nature of fossils. He also recognised a 

 certain orderly sequence in fossiliferous strata, and 



