368 HISTORY OF GEOLOGY AND PALEONTOLOGY. 



by great earth -cataclysms. Otherwise palaeontological re- 

 search between 1820 and 1860 made remarkable advances. 

 Innumerable new forms were brought to light by zealous strati- 

 graphers during their field surveys ; while the museums were 

 rapidly extending their collections, and affording ready oppor- 

 tunities to the younger minds of assimilating the broad facts 

 and tendencies of palaeontological investigations. 



Schlotheim had in 1804 laid the ground-work of a knowledge 

 of fossil plants, and Count von Sternberg l worthily continued 

 these pioneer labours. His chief work, Attempt at a Geognostic 

 Botanic Representation of the Flora of the Past (1820-32), 

 describes two hundred fossil species of plants, and is illustrated 

 by sixty splendid folio plates. Sternberg tried to insert the 

 fossil species into the botanical system of existing floras, 

 applied names correspondingly to the fossil species, and dis- 

 carded the old names under which the fossil forms had been i 

 known. He accomplished much for the proper botanical sig- 

 nificance of fossil floras, and paved the way for a scientific 

 treatment of palaeophytology. 



A year after the appearance of the first part of Sternberg's 

 work, Adolphe Brongniart 2 began his celebrated studies in 

 fossil plants. 



Like Sternberg, Brongniart also consistently carried out the 

 examination and description of fossil plants strictly on lines of 

 comparison with living plant-forms, and he arrived at similar 

 results. Brongniart had at his disposal much more extensive 

 material of observation than his German contemporary. His 

 first Treatise on the Classification and Distribution of fossil 

 Plants is therefore the most complete and most scientific 

 summary of all the fossil plants known before the year of 

 its publication, 1822. A large, richly illustrated work, whose 

 contents were made known in a preliminary Prodrome, was 

 intended to form a fuller supplement to the earlier treatise, 

 but unfortunately was never completed, and contains only the 



1 Kaspar Maria, Count von Sternberg, born 6th January 1761 at 

 Serowitz (Bohemia), belonged to an old family, was president of the 

 Bohemian National Museum, to which he bequeathed his library and 

 collections; died 2Oth December 1838. 



2 Adolphe Theodore Brongniart, born 1801 in Paris, the son of the 

 famous geologist, Alexandre Brongniart, studied medicine, but occupied 

 himself chiefly with botany; was in 1833 appointed Professor of Botany 

 at the Botanical Garden, in 1852 General Inspector of the University of 

 France; died on the I9th February 1876, in Paris. 



