AS COMPARED WITH THAT OF THE PRESENT DAY. 429 



The very desire to give a definite answer to the many puzzling ques- 

 tions proposed to the observer, has mainly increased the prevailing 

 readiness to draw arbitrary conclusions from the characters which the 

 outward appearance of a fossil affords : against this the student cannot 

 be too frequently warned. The earliest inquirers saw (and some see 

 still) the acorn, bean, hasel-nut, &c, in the strata of the coal formation, 

 parts of plants belonging to orders which are not acknowledged by the 

 sober geologist to have existed at that period. So the rude collier, 

 denying a vegetable origin to the ferns of the shale, beholds in them 

 merely the effort of a creative power which has fashioned stones in the 

 likeness of plants ; whilst his more reflective master recognizes fossil 

 snakes in Lepidodendron and mail-clad crocodiles in Sigillarice. He who 

 acknowledges all to be vegetables has advanced a step further, but 

 there he too may stop, if he does not pursue his investigations with due 

 caution ; for the measure of success which will reward his study will be 

 proportionate to the comprehensiveness of the view he takes of the whole 

 vegetation of the period in question, whether such view be the result of 

 his own experience, or adopted from the conclusions of others. Let 

 him remember that as remote districts on the globe are peopled, not 

 only by different species of plants but by different prevailing natural 

 orders, so the outward forms of one locality are imitated in the other by 

 objects which have no further relationship, and nothing else in common. 

 In this respect, intervals in time are marked by the same changes as 

 intervals in space. Let him likewise bear in memory, that the two most 

 experienced and distinguished observers have attained the same conclu- 

 sion regarding the general features of the coal Flora, which I shall give 

 in their own words. Goeppert, j in his resume' of the characters and 

 affinities of Stigmarice, says : — 



« d'ou s'ensuit une nouvelle preuve pour 1'opinion deja 



emanee tant de fois, que la vegetation actuelle et la primitive ne for- 

 ment q'une seule Flore, dans laquelle les families separees forment 

 actuellement un ensemble harmonieux, au moyen de formes interme- 

 diaires multipliers qui se trouvent tantot dans le monde actuel, tantot 

 dans le monde primitif." 



M. Brongniart, the most successful cultivator of the science, after 

 a careful review of the whole vegetation of the coal, excludes all existing 

 orders of flowering plants except Coniferce and Cycadece, and thus con- 

 cludes his essay on Noggerathia : — X 



* The tail-piece represents a very singular fossil fruit of the coal formation, possibly 

 belonging to the highest order of plants of any known during that epoch. It was dis- 

 covered by Mr. Wilson, of Barnsley, in the Oak's Quarry sandstone, and is apparently the 

 Trigonocarpum ovatum, Lindley and Hutton (Fossil Flora, t. 142 A.) 



t Goeppert, Genera des Plantes Fossiles, under Stigmaria, p. 29. 



\ Annales des Sciences Naturelles, Ser. 3, vol. 5, p. 6 1. 



