290 W. Carruthers — The Forests of the Coal Period, 



structure that a zoologist has not so difficult a task before him in 

 restoring, even from imperfect materials, the general aspect of an 

 extinct animal. 



I state these difficulties which face us at the very threshold of our 

 investigations, not to magnify the vfork before us this evening, but to 

 account for the comparatively little progress that has been made in 

 the interpretation of extinct floras, and for the great diversity of opinion 

 that exists among botanists as to the systematic position of numerous 

 fossil plants ; and further to account for the very large number of 

 genera and species which have been established on imperfect and 

 fragmentary materials, the systematic position of which is conse- 

 quently indeterminable. 



The progressive accumulation of observations, and the more care- 

 ful preservation of instructive specimens in local and private museums 

 are supplying the means of dealing with fossil botany after a different 

 method. The most important recent advances in. this science have 

 been made in uniting the se]:)arate fragments, — roots and stems, leaves 

 and fruits, — described under different names and placed in different 

 and often widely separated genera, so as to build up vegetable 

 individuals, the systematic position and affinities of which can be 

 understood. 



These observations are specially true in regard to the vegetation 

 of the Coal Period. Little information has been obtained from the 

 vast stores of the carbonized remains of the plants of this period 

 which are ever being brought under the inspection of man in the form 

 of coal, for this material is so completely altered as to be almost 

 destitute of structure. The best preserved plants occur in the beds 

 of shale which accompany the coal, or are obtained from earthy 

 nodules in the coal itself, which injure its marketable value, and are 

 consequently got rid of by the miners. 



We may at once set aside that great division of the vegetable 

 kingdom with which we are most familiar, comprising all plants 

 that have true flowers and seeds, and confine our attention to the 

 more obscure cryptogamous plants which are destitute of flowers, and 

 for seeds have bodies of much simpler structure called spores. The 

 cryptogams are either wholly cellular in their composition, like the 

 mosses and sea-weeds, or they are composed partly of cells and 

 partly of vessels, like the ferns and club-mosses. 



If we except some supposed AlgcB, no traces of true cellular plants 

 have been hitherto detected in the Coal-measures. The long-continued 

 maceration to which the coal plants were subjected when the beds 

 composed of their remains were forming on the surface of the earth, 

 and the subsequent changes they have undergone, have reduced to one 

 common, structureless mass the varied vegetation of which the coal is 

 composed. One of the first results of these operations would be the 

 disappearance of the cellular plants, which under the then existing 

 very favourable conditions must have abounded ; just as the soft 

 cellular parts are almost always destroyed of those specimens which 

 have been so favourably situated as to have their vascular tissue 

 preserved. 



