58 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 
as well as animals. Lehmann, for example, collected from the coal 
measure beds at Ihlfeld in the Hartz, and published a paper in 1756 on 
Aster montanus which he thought had been caught at the flood in full 
bloom. These blooms were really the nodal sheaths of Annularia spheno- 
phylloides. Gesner, in 1758, observed that some fossil animals and 
plants, like those of Oeningen, resembled the local types, while some were 
either of unknown forms or resembled those from distant parts of the 
world. One famous production of this time must be mentioned, namely, 
Knorr and Walch’s descriptions of Knorr’s collection (1755-1773). 
Knorr died soon after the commencement of the work, and Walch is 
really responsible for the greater part. A résumé of palzobotany to date 
was given and figures of many plants, petrifactions and impressions. It 
would be difficult to find more beautiful plates, from an artistic point of 
view, in the whole literature of palzobotany, but the illustrations are 
almost worthless for reference, in any endeavour to identify similar 
specimens. The classification too must be considered quite bizarre. 
None-the-less it was a classification, and, as such, deserves mention. 
Several works appeared during the latter part of the eighteenth century, 
the majority of the authors describing, with greater or less precision, the 
characters of fossil plants; but some, like Fuchsel, were also interested 
in the geological horizons at which the plants were found, and a few 
devoted themselves to classification, and correlation of the specimens 
with living forms. 
The labours of these scientists were soon destined to bear abundant 
fruit. It is true that the whole aspect of geological studies had shifted 
from palzontology to the wider problems of earth processes. The 
organic nature of fossils was now unquestioned, but the interest had 
swung over to the problem of rock formation and rock classification. The 
Vulcanists, Plutonists and Neptunists now held the centre of the stage ; 
but it almost seems as though the palzontologists had been gathering 
their forces in order to launch the next attack on the philosophy of the 
new times. Again the first assault was by means of observations on fossil 
plants, and it was perhaps in view of this that Brongniart has recalled that 
the plant kingdom ought perhaps to claim the honour of having forced 
the abandonment of the ridiculous ideas that attributed these remains of 
an ancient world to sports of nature and to plastic forces.4 Blumenbach 
had been teaching that many fossils, plants and animals alike, must have 
existed under conditions different from the present, as indeed had been 
involved in Jussieu’s writings many years before. But it was left to 
Baron von Schlotheim and James Parkinson almost simultaneously, in 
1804, and certainly unknown to one another, to draw attention to this 
aspect of palzontology. 
The names of their respective works are practically transliterations of 
one another. Schlotheim’s Flora der Vorwelt and Parkinson’s first volume 
of his Organic Remains of a Former World each deal with fossil plants ; 
and each emphasise the fact that the conditions under which the fossils 
had existed were different from those now extant, Schlotheim’s is 
11 Brongniart, Histoive des plantes fossiles, p. 2. 
