126 Ehrenherg's Discoveries — Notices of Eminent Men. 



with Count Bray (afterwards Bavarian minister at various courts,) 

 a man of letters, and a distinguished botanist. Count Sternberg 

 also cultivated botany, and became an active member of the Bo- 

 tanical Society of Ratisbon. During the time that Germany was 

 a prey to the miseries of war, he retired to his hereditary country 

 seat Brzezina, in the circle of Pilsen, in the northwestern part of 

 Bohemia, Here his attention was early drawn to the coal forma- 

 tion, of which mineral he possessed an extensive estate at Radnitz. 

 He soon formed the intention of publishing representations of the 

 fossil vegetables belonging to the coal strata. These had already 

 begun to excite the attention of geologists. Some of these works, 

 containing notices on such subjects, preceded the existence of 

 sound geology, as the Herharium Diluvianmn of Scheuchzer, 

 the Sylva Suhterranea of Beutinger, and the Lapis Diluvii Tes- 

 tis of Knoor.* At the beginning of the present century, Paujas 

 de St. Fond had published in the Annales du Museum some im- 

 pressions of leaves, not indeed belonging to the coal, but to a later 

 formation. These impressions were examined and determinued 

 by Count Sternberg, in the Botanical Journal of Ratisbon, in 

 1803. In the following year appeared the first truly scientific 

 work on this subject, the " Flora der VorwelV^ of Schlotheim, in 

 which the great problem which was supposed to demand a solu- 

 tion was. Whether the vegetables of which the traces are thus ex- 

 hibited belong to existing or to extinct kinds? Count Sternberg 

 was in Paris when he received the work of Schlotheim, and he 

 studied it carefully by the aid of the collections which exist in 

 that metropolis. He published in the Annales du Museum a no- 

 tice on the analogies of these plants, but concluded with observ- 

 ing, that a greater mass of facts was requisite ; and that, these 

 once collected, the general views which belong to the subject 

 would come out of themselves. 



Bearing in mind this remark of his own, when fortune, after the 

 storming of Ratisbon in 1809, set him down in the midst of the 

 great coal formations of Bohemia, he proceeded forthwith to man- 

 age the working of his mines, so as to preserve as much as pos- 

 sible the most remarkable impressions of fossils. Combining his 



* To the earlier works on this subject we may add Martin's Petrificata Derbien- 

 sia, published 1809 ; and Parkinson's Organic Remains, (1804,) which contains 

 many plates of vegetables. 



