NovEMBER 20, 1913] 
be described as the father of botanical palzobotany. 
It was Williamson who, in face of the opposition of 
every living botanist of his day, propounded the fact 
that the lower vascular plants could develop secondary 
wood without, as the French school of, paleeobotanists 
maintained, thereby qualifying for inclusion among 
the Angiosperms. Writing on Williamson’s work on 
~ Cambium, Solms Laubach said :-—‘‘ This is a general 
botanical result of the greatest importance and the 
widest bearing. In this conclusion paleontology has, 
for the first time, spoken the decisive word in a 
purely botanical question.”’ 
The anatomical structure of plants was also receiv- 
ing attention at the hands of other brilliant men, 
about the same time, chief among whom were 
Renault and Solms Laubach. 
The more geological side of palazobotany was at 
that time growing rapidly as a result of the researches 
of Saporta, Heer, Ettingshausen, Lesquereux, and 
others. Heer in particular was doing work of world- 
wide fame in his discoveries of Arctic floras which 
indicated a once warmer climate for those now frozen 
zones. Nevertheless to some of Heer’s work, and 
to many monographs published at the end of the nine- 
- teenth century, one might apply the following words, 
which, curiously enough, were published a hundred 
years before such work appeared. In 1784 Francis- 
Xavier Burtin said :—‘‘ Malheureusement ceux qui 
découvrent un fossile, s’empressent trop de le nommer, 
et le mot je l’ignore paroit avoir été de tout temps 
dur A prononcer. De 14 cette quantité de noms 
_absurdes, dont la science oryctologique parvient si 
difficultment A se débarrasser.”’ 
To-day palzobotany has three sides; or rather, the 
new science slowly reaching out from the shelter of 
its step-parents botany and geology, is already a 
growth with three main branches, each of which 
bears fruits of value to three sections of the com- 
munity. 
First, to botanists. Reference has been made to some 
of the recent work of palaeobotany as being indispensable 
to the science of modern botany. This is now recog- 
nised by every leading botanist, and Sir Joseph Hooker 
in a letter to Dr. Scott in 1906 wrote of our ‘‘ know- 
ledge of botany as it advances by strides under a 
study of its fossil representatives.’’ From the student 
of the fossils, one learns not only of whole genera, and 
even families’ of extinct plants, which help us to 
comprehend the relationships of existing types, but 
_ often the fossils exhibit complexities and novelties of 
character which not the most vivid imagination could 
have foreseen. For instance, what modern botanist, 
even in a delirious dream, could have conceived of a 
cone for the Lower Carboniferous Pteridophytes so 
complex as Cheirostrobus, the demonstration of the 
actual structure of which we owe to Dr. Scott? 
Then the existence in the past of the Pteridosperms, 
demonstrated by Prof. Oliver and Dr. Scott, is of 
profound importance to all botanists. 
The modern botanist’s conceptions of morphology, 
his definitions even of an organ like the seed, have 
undergone profound modification through the intro- 
duction of ideas based on fossils. Only from the 
_ fossils can we learn the actual facts of evolution. 
Connecting the botanist with the geologist is the 
plant-geographer. The history of Ginkgo, now an 
_ isolated species only found native in Japan and eastern 
_ China, but in Tertiary to Oolitic times widely distri- 
buted over Europe and America, illustrates with a 
single instance, the importance of the palzeobotanical 
record for those who deal with the distribution of 
modern plants. 
_ Asa Gray said :—‘‘ Fossil plants are the thermo- 
_ meters of the ages, by which climatic extremes and 
_ climate in general through long periods are best 
NO. 2299, VOL. 92] 
NATURE 361 
measured’’; and Charles Darwin, in 1881, wrote to 
Hooker :—‘‘The extreme importance of the Arctic 
fossil plants is self-evident.” 
Through the paleogeographer we come to the 
geologist. To what extent is he indebted to palzo- 
botany? In this country, it has been so arranged 
by nature that there are no immense tracts of land 
composed of strata in which the only fossils are 
plants; had there been, possibly that survey post held 
by Hooker in 1846 would not have lapsed. If our 
geologists think they can get along without palzo- 
botanists, let us hear what the Americans have to 
say. 
There are twelve paleontologists altogether in the 
United States Geological Survey, and of these four 
are paleobotanists. Take the record of one of these 
geological palzobotanists, Dr. Knowlton; he says :— 
“For the past five years I have annually studied and 
reported on from 500 to 700 collections, each of which 
embraced from one to hundreds of individuals, and 
with them have helped the geologists to fix perhaps 
fifty horizons in a dozen states.”’ 
Now let us turn to the third branch of my science. 
This is the practical side, and deals specially with 
coal-mining. In their rough and ready way, miners 
have ‘‘muddled along” without much help from 
palzobotanists. But with a collaboration between the 
two great advantages to both would accrue, and are 
to be looked for in the future. Palaeobotanical informa- 
tion, to be of any value to the miner, must be very 
detailed and accurate. It represents the ultimate 
refinement of the stratigraphical work just men- 
tioned as being the province of geological palzo- 
botany. Fine and accurate zoning by plants has 
already been successfully carried on, however, par- 
ticularly in France, where Prof. Zeiller, of Paris, or 
M. Grand’ Eury, is called in consultation before most 
mining operations of importance are undertaken. 
Palzobotany is an intricate and independent science, 
which is now much vaster than is realised by more 
than a few people. To illustrate the enormous mass 
of detail with which a conscientious palaobotanist 
has to cope, it is only necessary to turn to Dr. Jong- 
mans’s résumé of the publications for the year on the 
subject. It is 569 pages long, and on each page are, 
on an average, twenty-one entries. But this invalu- 
able work has only been published for the last three 
years. For everything before that we have no cen- 
tralisation of results. 
What will the paleobotanist of the future 
demand ? 
That in at least one institution in each civilised 
country there shall be a recognition of his science 
and adequate accommodation for it. This institution 
would form the headquarters, the centralising bureau, 
for all the branches of work in which the individual 
palzobotanists may be specialising whether as geo- 
logical palzobotanists, botanical palzobotanists, or 
practical miners. In this central department should 
be kept standardised collections of fossil plants. In 
this central department also should be available her- 
bariums and immense series of sections of modern 
plants with which to compare the fossils while work- 
ing on the botanical elucidation of their structure. 
As things are to-day in any new branch of palzo- 
botany, the modern botanists do not provide exactly 
the kind of data wanted for comparison by the palzo- 
botanist. This is noticeably the case, for instance, 
in the study of early fossil Angiosperms. No modern 
botanist can show us the preparations of living Angio- 
sperms that are essential for our researches. 
Then, too, in this central department of the science 
would be collected together, not only all the literature 
on palzobotany, but this literature would all be 
indexed, analysed, and made available on several 
