Point Lobos 203 



English ship to survey the northern coast of Australia. 

 On that ship, as it happened, fared forth a remarkable 

 student of nature. He was a botanist, bearing the sim- 

 ple name of Robert Brown, one of the greatest natural- 

 ists, I believe the greatest botanist, that ever lived. Be 

 that as it may, Brown so impressed his captain that the 

 latter resolved then and there to devote his life to scienti- 

 fic investigation. We all know the rest of that thrill- 

 ing story; how under Sir John Franklin and those who 

 followed him, expedition after expedition visited the ex- 

 treme north under an inspiration that has never flagged ; 

 unabated to this very day. Nor have these expeditions 

 ever lost the primal purpose of John Franklin. Every 

 vessel that has returned, from the days of the Erebus 

 until now, 1 has brought back new facts, new truth, and 

 new problems for thinking men. Early in the fifties a 

 vessel returning from Grinnell-Land unloaded a cargo 

 of fossil leaves. Further research brought similar ma- 

 terial from the coast of Greenland and from Spitzbergen. 

 These by good hap were sent to Switzerland, to a busy 

 minister there who had been recently picking up similar 

 objects, then all unstudied, at different places in the 

 Alps ! To the astonishment of the world Heer reported 

 from Grinnell-Land and from Greenland, all sorts of 

 flowering plants of types familiar, but now found only in 

 temperate or semi-tropical lands. There were poplars 

 and walnuts and hazels, nor less magnolias and laurels 

 and figs. Heer had found something more than fossil 

 leaves; he had so to speak, discovered a fossil climate, 

 and the key to the distribution of the flora of all the 

 i Dr. Cook had not yet returned when this was written. 



