XII 



THE PALAEONTOLOGICAL RECORD 

 II. PLANTS 



By D. H. Scott, F.R.S. 



President of the Linnean Society. 



There are several points of view from which the subject of the 

 present essay may be regarded. We may consider the fossil record 

 of plants in its bearing : I. on the truth of the doctrine of Evolution ; 

 II. on Phylogeny, or the course of Evolution; III. on the theory of 

 Natural Selection. The remarks which follow, illustrating certain 

 aspects only of an extensive subject, may conveniently be grouped 

 under these three headings. 



I. The Truth of Evolution. 



When The Origin of Species was written, it was necessary to 

 show that the Geological Record was favourable to, or at least 

 consistent with, the Theory of Descent. The point is argued, closely 

 and fully, in Chapter x. "On the Imperfection of the Geological 

 Record," and Chapter xi. " On the Geological Succession of Organic 

 Beings"; there is, however, little about plants in these chapters. 

 At the present time the truth of Evolution is no longer seriously 

 disputed, though there are writers, like Reinke, who insist, and 

 rightly so, that the doctrine is still only a belief, rather than an 

 established fact of science 1 . Evidently, then, however little the 

 Theory of Descent may be questioned in our own day, it is desirable 

 to assure ourselves how the case stands, and in particular how far the 

 evidence from fossil plants has grown stronger with time. 



As regards direct evidence for the derivation of one species from 

 another, there has probably been little advance since Darwin wrote, 

 at least so we must infer from the emphasis laid on the discontinuity 

 of successive fossil species by great systematic authorities like 

 Grand'Eury and Zeiller in their most recent writings. We must 

 either adopt the mutationist views of those authors (referred to in 



1 J. Reinke, " Kritische Abstammungslehre," Wiesner-Festschrift, p. 11, Vienna, 1908. 



