PROGRESS IN PALAEOPHYTOLOGY 169 



to such a book as Scott's Studies in Fossil Botany, which 

 is so familiar to you all. 



You will now, I hope, be able to appreciate how urgent 

 was the need for an entire revision of the taxonomy of 

 plants, so that these extremely important new types of 

 vegetation, even though long extinct, should find a home 

 in the scheme. For instance, it had been almost an 

 article of faith among botanists that the Palaeozoic was 

 the age of ferns, but the discovery of the Cycadofilices 

 revealed the possibility that these fern-like fossils were of 

 far higher rank than was at first thought, and that the 

 bulk of our living ferns, so far from being primitive, 

 were really of comparatively recent origin. The problem 

 of the evolution of the seed habit in Spermatophyta was 

 now in a fair way to be solved. The gaps between the 

 various branches of the Vascular Cryptogamic phylum 

 began to be bridged over, and the affinities of the living 

 types received new interpretations. If any further 

 evidence were required to overthrow the old dogma of the 

 constancy of species, and to support the newer views 

 that the plant world was itself a great tree, with its root 

 deep sunk in the immemorial past, with mighty branches 

 now completely extinct, or forerunners of delicate twigs 

 persistent to the present day, then the witnesses in the 

 rocks proffered this evidence in abundance. Yet even 

 now we have only, as it were, scratched the uppermost 

 layers of some of the strata that form the earth's crust ; 

 what may not deeper and more extensive excavations 

 reveal ? 



PROGRESS IN CRYPTOGAMIC MORPHOLOGY 



As you have already seen, the second half of the 

 nineteenth century was particularly fruitful in research 

 among the Pteridophyta, but in addition to the more 

 comprehensive works of Bower on the Morphology of 

 Spore-producing Members, of Campbell on Mosses and 

 Ferns, and of Goebel on the Comparative Development of 



