ee 
century, Faujas de St. Fond had published in the Annales du Mu- 
séum some impressions of leaves, not indeed belonging to the coal, 
but to a later formation. These impressions were examined and 
determined by Count Sternberg, in the Botanical Journal of Ratis- 
bon, in 1803. In the following year appeared the first truly scien- 
tific work on this subject, the “ Flora der Vorwelt” 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 stu- 
died it carefully by the aid of the collections which: exist in that 
metropolis. He published in the Annales du Muséum a notice on 
the analogies of these plants, but concluded with observing, 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 manage the 
working of his mines, so as to preserve as much as possible the 
most remarkable impressions of fossils. Combining his own speci- 
mens with those found in other places, he began to publish, in 1820, 
his “Essay towards a Geognostic-botanical Representation of the 
Flora of the Pre-existing World.” In this work he not only gave a 
great number of very beautiful coloured engravings of vegetable 
fossils, but also attempted a systematic classification of them. But 
he stated, in the first portion of his work*, that the problems, im- 
portant alike for botany and geology, which offered themselves, 
could only be solved by combined labours on a common plan; and 
after mentioning the various European Societies to which he looked 
for assistance (among which he includes this Society ), he adds, “ Bo- 
hemia and the hereditary states of the Austrian empire, I am ready, 
with some friends of science, to make the subject of continued in- 
vestigation.” The specimens of which he published representations, 
with many more, formed the Count’s collection at his castle of Brze- 
zina; but he declared in the outset, that as soon as the National Bo- 
Derbiensia, published 1809; and Parkinson’s Organic Remains (1804), 
which contains many plates of vegetables. 
* Hrster Heft, p. 16. 
WON. Wate G 
