120 FOSSILS THEIR NATURE AND ARRANGEMENT. 



places, or at all events to approximate to their places, in the 

 vegetable and animal schemes. These determinations, in- 

 deed, constitute the main duty of palaeontology ; and when 

 one considers how widely scattered fossils usually are, how 

 sorely mutilated and fragmentary they often appear, and 

 that they are largely the chance findings of quarrymen and 

 miners, it is truly marvellous how much of reliable world- 

 history the science, within little more than half a century, 

 has been able to reveal. It is true there is still very much 

 to be done, and perhaps more in fossil botany than in fossil 

 zoology, inasmuch as vegetable organisms are less perfectly 

 preserved than animal, and because the classifications of the 

 botanist are mainly founded on the flowers and leaves 

 portions which of all others are the most evanescent and 

 perishable. Notwithstanding these difficulties, the palaeon- 

 tologist finds that all his fossils belong to the same great 

 scheme of life with existing plants and animals, and he is 

 therefore restricted to the classifications that have been de- 

 vised by the botanist and zoologist. Species, and genera, 

 and families, and even what are called orders, may have 

 become extinct, and others in the course of creation may 

 have taken their places; still the great Scheme of Vitality 

 has ever been evolved according to a fixed and determinate 

 plan, and in harmony with this plan, and to the best of 

 their knowledge, botanist, zoologist, and palaeontologist must 

 endeavour to conform their systematic arrangements. 



In speaking of fossil plants, therefore, the palseophytologist 

 adopts the usual classification of the botanist, placing where 

 he can his fossils under their proper genera and orders, and 

 where he cannot, assigning to them a provisional place next 

 to the genus or order to which they bear the greatest resem- 

 blance. In this course he uses the same botanical terms, 

 and employs the same botanical phraseology, and these may 



