96 Commentary on 



Art. III. — A Commentary on " A Communication made by the 

 Rev. W. B. Clarke to His Excellency Sir Henry Barkly, 

 K.C.B.^ &c., kjC, President of the Royal Society ofVicfoi'ia, 

 on Professor McCoy's new Tceniopteris, S^c, ^c." — By 

 Frederick McCoy, Esq., F.G.S., Honorary Fellow of 

 the Cambridge Philosophical Society, Professor of the 

 Natural Sciences in the University of Melbourne, Govern- 

 ment Palceontologist, and Director of the National Museum.. 



[Read before the Eoyal Society, 25th J\me, I860.] 



My great dislike of controversy, and my belief that the time 

 of a scientific man may be better employed in endeavouring 

 to add new facts to the general store of human knowledge, 

 than in defending himself or his views, when once put forward, 

 would certainly have induced me on this occasion, as on most 

 similar ones, to let my opponent's views and mine stand 

 without discussion for the judgment of those concerned. 

 Having, however, been honoured with a request — which to 

 me is a command — to furnish a written comment on Mr. 

 Clarke's paper to the Royal Society this evening, I do so 

 cheerfully ; and the more so as it is just possible that some 

 members of this Society might feel inclined to attach some 

 weight to any deliberate statement of mine on natural science, 

 and not having time to sift the e^ddence for themselves, might 

 wish to hear my reply when such statements were contro- 

 verted. 



I will pass over without remark the apparent discourtesy 

 in the first paragraph, in which (without having seen 

 the fossil) he doubts my assertion, made at the last 

 meeting of the Society, that a fossil fern from the 

 coal rocks at the mouth of the Bass River belonged 

 to the genus Tceniopteris. I will simply prove my as- 

 sertion, if not to the satisfaction of Mr. Clarke, certainly 

 to that of every one else, including one authority at least 

 (Dr. Mueller), to whom, I believe, he admits the neces- 

 sity of paying deference in botanical matters. Mr. 

 Clarke has been at the pains to copy out, in the con- 

 cluding part of his paper, the true generic characters of 

 Tceniopteris, as he accepts it, from the works of Brongniart, 

 Goppert, and of Lindley and Hutton. I was not ig- 

 norant of these characters, when I referred my fossil to 



