IIo 
NATURE > 
[ Fune 9, 1870 
in the matter of education. But Government is slow to move, 
and is quite sure not to please everybody when it does. In the 
meantime let scientific societies, each anxious for the spread of 
knowledge on its own subject, take example by the Royal Geo- 
graphical Society. Let prizes and honourable mentions be 
offered, let them be somewhat difficult of attainment, and let 
the distinction be matter of public award; and it will soon be 
seen that the scientific education of the country will have received 
a healthy and vigorous impulse, which will do much to spread 
the desired instruction through all classes of the nation. 
J. A. CHESSAR 
ON THE PROGRESS OF BOTANY IN 1869 
Il. 
Wiru regard to the succession of races which have undergone a 
complete specific change through successive geological periods, 
ye have not in plants, in as far as I am aware, any such cases of 
‘true linear types or forms which are intermediate between 
others because they stand in a direct genetic relation to them,” 
as Professor Huxley appears to have made out in favour of the 
pedigree of the horse in his last anniversary address to the Geo- 
logical Society. And I may, in regard to plants, repeat with 
still greater emphasis his dictum, that ‘‘it is no easy matter to 
find clear and unmistakable evidence of filiation among fossil 
animals ; for in order that such evidence should be quite satis- 
factory, it is necessary that we should be acquainted with all the 
most important features of the organisation of the animals which 
are supposed to be thus related, and not merely with the frag- 
ments upon which the genera and species of the palzontologist 
are so often based.” The difficulty is much greater in the case 
of fossil plants ; for instead of bones, teeth, or shells, portions of 
internal or external skeletons, the parts preserved to us from the 
Tertiary period are generally those least indicative of structural 
organisation. Mr. Carruthers has recently (Geological Magazine, 
April and July 1869, and Journal of the Geological Society, 
August 1869) adduced satisfactory evidence of the close affinity 
of Siei/aria and the allied genera of the coal-period with the 
living Lycopodiacez, formerly suggested by Dr. Hooker, but, as 
he informs me, no connecting links, no specimens indeed of the 
whole order, have as yet been found in any of the intermediate 
Cretaceous or Tertiary deposits. Among the latter the presence 
of numerous types, to which we may plausibly refer as to the 
ancestors of living races, is established upon unimpeachable data ; 
but I have been unable to find that a single case of authentic 
pedigree, as successively altered from the Cretaceous through the 
abundant deposits of the Eocene and Miocene period to the 
living races, has been as yet as satisfactorily made out as that of 
the absolute identity of Zaxodium and others above mentioned, 
although I feel very little doubt that such a one will yet be traced 
when our paleontologists will have ceased to confound and 
reason alike upon the best proved facts and the wildest guesses. 
Our late distinguished foreign member, Professor Unger, whose 
loss we have had so recently to deplore, had indeed, shortly 
before his death, published, under the name of ‘‘ Geologie der 
Europaischen Waldbaume, part 1. Laubhdlzer,” no less than 
twelve tabular pedigrees of European forest races ; but it seems 
to me that in this, as in another of the same eminent palzontolo- 
gist’s papers to which I shall presently have to refer, his specula- 
tions have been deduced more freely from conjectures than from 
facts. There is no doubt that the presence of closely allied re- 
presentatives of our Beeches, Birches, Alders, Oaks, Limes, &c., 
in the Tertiary deposits of central and southern Europe is fully 
proved by inflorescences and fruits as well as leaves ; but how 
can we establish the successive changes of character in a race 
when we have only the inflorescence of one period, the fruit of 
another, and the leaf of a third? Ido not find a single case in 
which all three have been found in more than one stage, and by 
far the great majority of these fossil species are established on 
the authority of detached leaves or fragments of leaves alone. 
Now let us consider for a moment what place a leaf really 
holds in systematic botany. Would any experienced systematic 
botanist, however acute, on the sole examination of an unknown 
leaf, presume to determine, not only its natural order and 
genus, but its precise characters as an unpublished species? 
It is true that monographists have sometimes published new 
species founded on specimens without flower or fruit, which 
from collateral circumstances of habitat, collector’s notes, general 
resemblance, &c., they had good reason to believe really be- 
longed to the genus they were occupied with ; but then they 
had the advantage of ascertaining the general facies derived from 
insertion, relative position, presence or absence of stipular appen- 
dages, &c., besides the data supplied by the branch itself. 
And with all these aids even the elder De Candolle, than whom 
no botanist was more sagacious in judging of a genus from general 
aspect, was proved to have been in several instances far wrong in 
the genus, and even order, to which he had attributed species 
described from leaf specimens only. Palzeontologists, on the 
other hand, have, in the majority of these Tertiary deposits, 
had nothing to work upon but detached leaves or fragments 
of leaves, exhibiting only outward form, venation, and, to a 
certain degree, epidermal structure, all of which characters 
may be referred to that class which Professor Flower, in his 
introductory lecture at the Royal College of Surgeons in Febru- 
ary last, has so aptly designated as adaptive, in contradistinction 
to essential and fundamental characters. They may, when taken 
in conjunction with relative individual abundance, assist in form- 
ing a general idea cf the aspect of vegetation, and thus give 
some clue to certain physical conditions of the country; but 
they alone can afford no indication of genetic affinity, or con- 
sequently of origin or successive geographical distribution. 
Lesquereux, in speaking of Cretaceous ‘‘species, or rather 
forms of leaves,” observes ina note to his paper on Fossil Plants 
from Nebraska (.Sid//iman’s Fournal, vol. xlvi. July 1868, p. 103), 
that ‘‘ it is well understood that when the word sfecies is used in 
an examination of fossil plants, it is not taken in its precise sense, 
for indeed no sfectes can be established from leaves or mere frag- 
ments of leaves. But as paleontologists have to recognise these 
forms described and figured, to compare them and use them for 
references, it is necessary to affix to them, specific names, and 
therefore to consider them as species.”’ But the investigators of 
the Tertiary floras of Central and Southern Europe have acquired 
the habit, not only of neglecting this distinction, and naming and 
treating these forms of leaves as species equivalent to those 
established on living plants, but of founding upon them 
theories which must fall to the ground if such specific deter- 
mination proves inaccurate. Nothing can be more satisfactory 
than such determinations as that of /odogonium for instance, 
which Professor Heer has succeeded in proving, by numerous 
specimens of leaves, fruits, and even flowers, some of them still 
attached to the branches, which I had myself the pleasure of 
inspecting last summer under the friendly guidance of the dis- 
tinguished Professor himself. This genus of Czesalpineze, from 
its evident affinity with Pelfogyne, Tamarindus and others now 
scattered over the warmer regions of America and Africa, and 
more sparingly in Asia, tells a tale of much significance as to the 
physico-geographical relations of the Swiss Tertiary vegetation, 
confirmed as it is by some other equally, or almost equally, con- 
vincing examples. But the case appears to me to be far 
different from the theory so vividly expounded by Professor Unger 
in 1861 in his Address entitled ‘‘ Neu Holland in Europa ;” 
this generally admitted theory seems to me to be established 
on some such reasoning as this:—There are in the Tertiary de- 
posits in Europe, and especially in the earlier ones, a number 
of leaves that look like those of Proteaceze ; Proteaceze are a 
distinguishing feature in Australian vegetation ; evge, European 
vegetation had in those times much of an Australian type 
derived from a direct land communication with that distant 
region. 
This conviction that Proteacez, belonging to Australian 
genera, were numerous in Europe in Eocene times, is indeed 
regarded by paleontologists as one of the best proved of their 
facts. They enumerate nearly 100 Tertiary species, and most of 
them with such absolute confidence that it would seem the height 
of presumption for so inexperienced a palzeontologist as myself to 
express any doubt on the subject. And yet, although the remains 
of the Tertiary vegetation are far too scanty to assert that 
Proteacez did not form part of it, I have no hesitation in stating 
that I do not believe that a single specimen has been found that 
a modern systematic botanist would admit to be Proteaceous, 
unless it had been received from a country where Proteacez were 
otherwise known to exist. And, on other grounds, I should be 
most unwilling to believe that any of the great Australian 
branches of the order ever reached Europe. Ass this is a state- 
ment requiring much more than mere assertion on my part, Ishall 
beg to enter into some detail, commencing with a short summary 
of my grounds of disbelief in European Tertiary Proteacez, 
and then examining into the supposed evidences of their 
existence, 
The analysis and detailed descriptions I haye had to make 
