HOOKER — READING FOSSIL, PLANTS. 165 



from foliage, that it merely requires a leading idea to suggest affi- 

 nities when imperfect remains of foliage are alone at the naturalist's 

 disposal. I have no hesitation in saying, that were I assured from 

 collateral evidence of the flora of the Reading beds being intimately 

 allied to that of India, I should find no difficulty in producing the 

 allied living representatives ; and the same may be said of the vege- 

 tation of many other parts of the globe : it requires, however, some 

 general acquaintance with the plants inhabiting different parts of the 

 world, to appreciate the fallacious nature of the evidence afforded by 

 leaves ; these being of all organs the least important for the higher 

 purposes of classification : a fact rendered familiar to the botanist by 

 the habitual practice of naming a species of one genus from the 

 similarity of its foliage to that of some other plant often in a totally 

 different natural order. 



There are two points to which I may allude, as being of practical 

 iniportance to be borne in mind in examining questions of this nature. 

 One is the extreme difficulty found in identifying the imperfect re- 

 mains of existing plants, although we may be familiar with the flora 

 to which they belong 5 and the other is, that when the clue to specific 

 identity is lost, and a false identification is made, it is generally 

 very wide indeed of the truth. My attention has been particularly 

 drawn to these facts in foreign countries, when examining recent de- 

 posits in silt ; and, though I am quite ready to admit that the power 

 pf identification in such cases depends as much upon a degree of skill 

 or tact, which differs in amount with every individual, as upon abso- 

 lute botanical knowledge, still I think that no one who has not re- 

 sorted to an experimenhim crucis of this sort can form a just idea of 

 the real difficulties of the task, of the number of species he may make 

 of different leaves of the same plant, of the false aflinities he may 

 4raw, and the false conclusions to which he may be led. 



Had the fossils of the Reading beds been presented to me in a rpcent 

 state, and without my knowing their native place, I do not believe I 

 should have been able to approximate with any tolerable degree of 

 certainty to their affinities one with another, or to their position in 

 the vegetable kingdom ; and as I further do not think that they are 

 even generically recognizable, I cannot deem it advisable to give them 

 generic and specific names. The excelleut plate which accompanies 

 Mr. Prestwich's memoir serves all the purposes of a description, as 

 the fossils possess no botanical characters of importance not repre- 

 sented in the lithograph (PI. IV.). 



It will not, I h: pe, be inferred, that, in refraining from naming and 

 defining these vegetable remains, I am undervaluing their importance 

 in a geological or botanical point of view. On the contrary, I think 

 that giving them a fictitious value of this kind (which requires neither 

 skill nor knowledge) is not only a perversion of the true aim and 

 object of botanical science, but is calculated to mislead both geologists 

 and botanists, besides swelling those already unmanageable catalogues 

 of names for unintelligible fragments of vegetables, miscalled systems 

 of fossil plants. Both in a geological and botanical point of view the 

 Reading fossils are of first-rate interest and importance, as presenting 



