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allied to Earopean Miocene species, while the Miocene group of Carbon 

 represents the youngest type of the Tertiary flora of Europe and Green- 

 land, with species of Platanus, Acer, etc., scarcely distinguishable from 

 indigenous species of our present flora. 



More important questions than these, but as yet problems only, belong 

 to the domain of vegetable paleontology. Is the multiplication and suc- 

 cession of species a result of gradual modifications of organs or of a 

 spontaneous production ? No positive answer has been given to this 

 question, which occupies the mind of every naturalist, and which, as 

 Gray justly says, is a problem whose solution is reserved to vegetable 

 paleontology. Fossil plants are documents relating to the past history 

 of the world. They have recorded in their characters the physical con- 

 ditions of the atmosphere from the earliest period. Science has as yet 

 deciphered few incomplete fragments of these records. Every student 

 may read a page or a line of this admirable book. As vegetable life is 

 the promoter of animal life, it precedes and explains it. No one knows 

 as yet in what relation the characters of the representatives of both 

 kingdoms may stand, and whether the animal forms may not be ex- 

 plained or surmised by those of the plants. On the one hand, especially, 

 in recognizing the transitions which unite some species, modifica- 

 tions which appear in plants as resulting from atmospheric influence, it 

 seems as if the development of the vegetable world was subject to mere 

 material laws. Ou another hand, every naturalist is forced to acknowl- 

 edge not only a profound intelligence in the plan, in the admirable har- 

 mony governing the vegetable world even in its minutest details, but to 

 recognize also and to proclaim omnipotent prescience and providence in 

 the preparation of the materials which, as a presage of the advent of 

 man, have been garnered up in his abode and by the world of plants for 

 the fulfillment of his future destiny. 



The possibility of ever being able to answer questions of this kind has 

 been denied to vegetable paleontology on account of its want of precision 

 in the determination of vegetable remains. But this science is in its 

 infancy ; and the childhood of science is marked, like that of man, by a 

 series of trials and failures, from which strength and proficiency are 

 derived. The first astronomers did not measure the distance from the 

 earth to the fixed stars, nor weigh the planets by the diameter of their 

 orbits. Hooker himself, the most precise and careful analyzer of botani- 

 cal characters, recognizes the accuracy of the determinations of Heer in 

 his admirable work on the Tertiary flora of Switzerland. The award of 

 the great Wollaston medal to the celebrated professor of Ziirich suffi- 

 ciently proves the appreciation of the services rendered to science by 

 vegetable paleontology, and the high rank which it has already attained 

 in Euroi)e. 



