Vol. III. NOVEMBER, 1887. No. 31 



FOSSIL BOTANY, III 



In regard to the question of evolution in its broadest sense, 

 fossil botany furnishes but little satisfactory evidence in its favor, 

 aside from the lacts that, classes of plants which are now small in 

 extent, were formerly much more important factors in the floras, 

 and that other classes now largely represented by living plants, 

 were formerly of but small proportions relatively, and that there 

 has been a continuous succession of species. 



There should be intermediate forms connecting species, genera, 

 and other divisions of plant life, in order to prove conclusively 

 that all plants, living and extinct, originated in, and descended 

 from, the Alg^e, the oldest plants of which we have any knowl- 

 edge, and which have come down through all the ages, but little 

 changed in appearance from their earliest type. 



Other divisions of the vegetable kingdom have appeared at 

 various periods of the world's history, and our records fail to 

 show that they have had any closer affinities with the older forms 

 of vegetation than is apparent in the flora of the present. 



The Algae were as distinct from the mosses; the mosses just as 

 different from the ferns, and the cryptogams or flowerless plants 

 as readily separated from the phanerogams or flowering plants as 

 they are now. 



We do not find that the Algae were merged or developed into 

 phanerogams with final loss of identity, as would be the case if 

 all plants had descended from the earliest type. 



The records of geology, incomplete as they are, show that na- 

 ture, under certain conditions and at various times, evolves forms 

 of animal and vegetable life, which cannot, by any method of 

 classification, be followed or traced back to any one universal type 

 or form. 



We can go back to certain points where we are stopped by an 

 intangible but impassable veil, behind which nature hides her 

 secrets; and we are unable to learn how and why these changes 

 were accomplished, we only know that they were. 



During the tertiary age, a large portion of the dry land of our 

 time was covered by oceans, whose deposits, where they have not 



