﻿ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. xlix 



at the omission in another part of Europe of all the beds between 

 the coal-measures and the lias ; and it seems clear that if we assent 

 to the doctrine that the Verrucano of Volterra is a palaeozoic rock, 

 we are simply required to transfer to Tuscany the flexures and in- 

 verted position so characteristic of the beds in many parts of the 

 Alps, and we should have the enigma of Petit-Cceur repeated. 



Having offered these observations on the fossil plants of the pri- 

 mary strata, a few words may suffice for the flora of the secondary 

 and tertiary eras, for in these all botanists seem to agree that some 

 highly developed families of monocotyledons, such as the Liliaceae 

 and Palms, occur. In the inferior oolite of England, we find the 

 fruit of Podocarya, so well described and illustrated by Dr. Buckland 

 in his Bridgewater Treatise, and which seems clearly to have been an 

 endogen closely allied to the Pandanus or Screw Pine. 



In the strata from the triassic to the Purbeck inclusive, comprising 

 Brongniart's age of gymnosperms, plants of the family of Zamia and 

 Cycas, together with Coniferae, predominated in Europe far more 

 than anywhere now on the globe in corresponding latitudes. They 

 must have given to the flora of this period a peculiar aspect, but 

 our data are too scanty to entitle us to affirm that the vegetation of 

 this second epoch was on the whole of a simpler organization than 

 that of our own times. In Bronn's catalogue 223 species only of plants 

 are enumerated in all the rocks ranging from the lias to the middle 

 oolite inclusive. Not a few even of these are referred to Algae, 29 

 species of that tribe having been obtained from the lithographic 

 slate of Solenhofen and the neighbourhood, all from one subdivision 

 of the oolite. 



The cretaceous strata are classed by Brongniart together with the 

 tertiary in the last of his three periods before alluded to, namely 

 the age of angiosperms. The two upper divisions of the Wealden, 

 the Hastings sand and Weald clay, may probably, for reasons to which 

 I shall allude in the sequel, be referred to the same age. In regard 

 to the rocks ranging from the lower greensand to the Maestricht beds 

 inclusive, they are chiefly marine, and we have therefore as yet but 

 little information respecting the contemporary plants which grew 

 on the land, but such as are known display a transition-character 

 between the vegetation of the secondary and that of the tertiary 

 formations. Coniferae and Cycadeae still continued to flourish, and 



vol. vii. e 



