OSWALD HEER. 449 



became interested in the arctic fossil flora, of which he be- 

 came the principal investigator and expounder. His first es- 

 say in the domain which he has made so peculiarly his own 

 was in a paper on certain fossil plants of Vancouver's Island 

 and British Columbia, published in 1865; and in 1868 he 

 brought out the first of that most important series of memoirs 

 upon the ancient floras of arctic America, Greenland, Spitz- 

 bergen, Nova Zembla, arctic and subarctic Asia, etc., which, 

 collected, make up the seven quarto volumes of the " Flora 

 Fossilis Arctica." The seventh volume of this monumental 

 work was brought to a conclusion only a few months before 

 the author's death. 



Heer's researches into the fossil botany of the tertiary de- 

 posits were very important in their bearings. They made it 

 certain that our actual temperate floras round the world had 

 a common birthplace at the north, where the continents are 

 in proximity ; they essentially identified the direct or col- 

 lateral ancestors of our existing forest-trees which flourished 

 within the arctic zone when it enjoyed a climate resembling 

 our own at present ; and they leave the similarities and the 

 dissimilarities of the temperate floras of the Old and the New 

 World to be explained as simple consequences of established 

 facts. Thus Heer himself did away with his own hypothesis 

 of a continental Atlantis by bringing to light the facts which 

 proved that there was no need of it. And while thus justify- 

 ing the ideas which had been brought forward in one pf the 

 memoirs of the American Academy (in 1859) before these 

 fossil data were known, he was not slow to adopt and to ex- 

 tend the tentative views which he had confirmed. 



A list of Heer's scientific publications is given in the " Bo- 

 tanisches Centralblatt," No. 5, for 1884. They are seventy- 

 seven in number, besides the seven quarto volumes of the 

 " Flora Fossilis Arctica," which comprise a considerable num- 

 ber of independent memoirs. These works make an era in 

 vegetable palaeontology. Their crowning general interest is 

 that they bring the vegetation of the past into direct connec- 

 tion with the present. 



Although he lived to a good old age, and was never inac- 



