ADDRESS. lxv 
and ability of the present Conservator, Mr. Flower, it retains the position it 
attained thirty years ago, of being the best and richest institution of the kind 
in Europe. 
In my own special science, the greatest advances that have been made 
during the last ten years have been in the departments of Fossil Botany and 
Vegetable Physiology. 
In the past history of the globe two epochs stand prominently forward 
(the Carboniferous and the Miocene) for the abundant materials they afford, 
and the light they consequently throw on the early conditions of the vege- 
table kingdom. Why plants should have been so much more abundantly 
preserved during these than during some of the intervening or earlier epochs, 
we do not rightly know; but the comparative poverty of the floras of these 
latter is amongst the strongest evidences of the imperfection of the geological 
record. 
Our knowledge of coal plants, which, since the days of Sternberg, Brong- 
niart, and Lindley and Hutton, has been chiefly advanced by Goeppert and 
Unger on the Continent, and by Dawson in Canada, has of late received 
very important accessions through the untiring energy of Mr. Binney, of 
Manchester, who has devoted nearly thirty years to the search for those 
rarely found specimens which exhibit the internal structure of the plant. 
His elaborate descriptions of the most abundant, and, before his researches, 
the least understood plant of the coal-measures, Calamites, have just appeared 
in the memoirs of the Paleontographical Society ; and some of Mr. Binney’s 
materials having also formed the subject of a very recent and valuable paper 
by Mr. Carruthers, of the British Museum, I may quote their joint results as 
one. These show that Calamites is an actual member of the existing family 
of Equisetacez, which contained previcusly but one genus, that of the com- 
mon mare’s tails of our river-banks and woods; as also, that nearly a dozen 
other genera of coal-measure plants may be referred to it. This affinity of 
Calamites had, indeed, been guessed at before, but the genera now referred 
to it, having been founded on mere fragments, were always doubtful; but 
the value of these positive identifications is none the less on this account. 
It may hereafter prove of some significance, that these Calamites, which, in 
the coal epoch, assumed gigantic proportions, and presented multitudinous 
forms and very varied organs of growth, are now represented by but one 
genus, differing most remarkably from its prototype in size, and in the sim- 
plicity and uniformity of its vegetable organs. 
Passing to the Tertiary Flora, the labours of Count Saporta in France, of 
Gaudin and Strozzi, and of Massolonghi in Italy, of Lesquereux in America, 
and above all, of Heer in Switzerland, have within the last ten years accu- 
mulated a vast number of species of fossil plants; and if the determinations 
of the affinities of the majority are to be depended on, they prove the per- 
sistence, throughout the Tertiary strata, of many existing families and genera, 
and the rarity of others than these. Here, however, much value cannot be 
attached to negative evidence. Almost the only available materials for de- 
termining the affinities of the vast majority of these Tertiary plants are their 
mutilated leaves, and, unlike the bones of vertebrate animals and the shells 
of Mollusks, the leaves of individual plants are extremely variable in all their 
characters. Furthermore, the leaves of plants of different natural families, 
and of different countries, mimic one another to such a degree that, in the 
case of recent plants, every botanist regards these organs as most treacherous 
guides to affinity. Of the structural characters, which are drawn from the 
i 7) organs of plants, and especially from their fruits, seeds, and flowers, 
° € 
