' 





46 



THE GEOLOGICAL UISTORY OF PLANTS. 



a large number of the genera occurring in the succeeding 

 Carboniferous system. 



Goeppert does not inchide in his enumeration the 

 plants from the Devonian of Gaspe, described by the 

 author in 1859,* having seen only an abstract of the 

 paper at the time of writing his memoir, nor does he 

 appear to have any knowledge of the plants of this age 

 described by Lcsquereux in Rogers's ** Pennsylvania." 

 These might have added ten or twelve species to his list, 

 some of them probably from the Lower Devonian. It is 

 further to be observed that a few additional species had 

 also been recognised by Peach in the Old Red Sandstone 

 of Scotland. 



But fiom 1860 to the present time a rich harvest of 

 specimens has been gathered from the Gaspe sandstones, 

 from the shales of southern New Brunswick, from the 

 sandstones of Perry in Maine, and from the wide-spread 

 Erian areas of New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. 

 Nearly all tiiese specimens have passed through my 

 hands, and I am now able to catalogue about a hun- 

 dred species, representing more than thirty genera, and 

 including all the great types of vascular Cryptogams, the 

 Gymnosperms, and even one (still doubtful) Angiosperm. 

 Many new forms have also been described from the De- 

 vonian of Scotland and of the Continent of Europe. 



Before describing these plants in detail, we may refer 

 to North America for illustration of the physical condi- 

 tions of the time. In a physical point of view the north- 

 ern hemisphere presented a great change in the Erian 

 period. There were vast foldings of the crust of the 

 earth, and great emissions of volcanic rock on both sides 

 of the Atlantic. In North America, while at one time 

 the whole interior area of the continent, as far north as 



* " Journal of the Geological Society of London," also " Canadian 

 Naturalist." 



