﻿ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. xlvii 



containing impressions of plants, which exhibit the usual characteristics 

 of the oolitic flora, and include no Triassic, Permian or Carboniferous 

 species. 



Mr. Bunbury admits that certain living ferns have a very wide 

 range in latitude, but still they offer no parallel in their geographical 

 distribution in space to the supposed range in time of the anthracitic 

 flora of the Alps ; for, in proportion as each living species spreads far- 

 ther and farther from its point of departure or chief centre of deve- 

 lopment, it becomes more and more mixed with the plants of other 

 provinces. Nowhere could the botanist point to a group of forty 

 trees, shrubs, or ferns flourishing at two remote points in the globe 

 unmixed with foreign plants, and separated by two or more provinces 

 of distinct species. 



That we may not underrate the real amount of the supposed ano- 

 maly or exception to all ordinary rules, in the case of the anthracitic 

 flora of the Alps (assuming it to be of Jurassic date), we must bear 

 in mind that the beds containing it are not simply regarded by M. E. 

 de Beaumont as the equivalents of the lias, but also as corresponding in 

 age to the Oxford clay or middle oolite, as, for example, at Chardon- 

 net near Briancon, to which Mr. Bunbury has alluded in his paper*. 

 Hence we should be called upon to believe that certain species of 

 Sigillaria and Stigmaria, of Asterophyllite, Lepidodendron, and Cala- 

 mite, together with a multitude of Ferns, had lived on through the 

 Carboniferous and Permian periods, through the lower and upper 

 Triassic, and still survived in the eras of the lias, inferior oolite, and 

 Oxford clay, without permitting any of the characteristic species of 

 these several epochs to intrude themselves into their company. 



The late celebrated palseontologist, M. Yoltz, when he conversed 

 with me on this subject in 1833 at Strasburg, had satisfied himself 

 that certain islands in the tropics quite isolated from other lands, 

 had continued to grow the plants in question throughout the vast 

 interval of time which separated the coal from the lias, and that 

 fragments of their stems and leaves were drifted by a marine cur- 

 rent over the ocean and buried with belemnites and marine shells in 

 muddy liassic sediment thrown down in the latitude of the Alps, flow- 

 ever violent such an hypothesis may appear, no other has since been 



* Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. vol. v. pp. 133, 136. 



