Gaston, Marquis de Saporta. 361 



OBITUARY. 



( rASTON, Marquis de Saporta. 



The Marquis de Saporta was born July 28th, 1823, and 

 died, .u the age of 72 years, on January 26th of the 

 present year, at his residence in Aix-en-Provence. 



Since the appearance of his first paper on the Fossil 

 Plants of Provence, in I860, lie has been a prominent 

 palseobotanist, and yields to few cultivators of that science 

 in the Qumber, variety and importance of his memoirs and 

 larger works. His largest and most important wort is 

 that on the Mesozoic Flora of France, to which he added 

 only last year a valuable report on the Mesozoic Plants of 

 Portugal. A summary of this last work, in connection 

 more particularly with its bearing on the paleobotany of 

 North America, from the pen of Prof. Lester F. Ward, a 

 fellow laborer in the United States, has lately appeared in 

 Science, and perhaps with the exception of those of his 

 great rival, Heer of Zurich, who passed away before him, 

 no European works on the botany of the Mesozoic Period 

 are more frequently referred to than those of Saporta. 



Though a specialist on the floras of the later geological 

 periods, he could enter with enthusiasm into the whole 

 history of the vegetable kingdom, in a manner at once 

 elaborate, careful and attractive to general readers, and 

 with an enlightened grasp of the succession of plants in 

 time, and of their relations to the various changes of 

 climate and geography in the different periods. This is 

 remarkable in his popular work-, " Le Monde des Plantes," 

 which goes over the whole field of geological botany, is 

 written in a clear and vivid style, and illustrated with 

 geological maps and very clever restorations of the forests 

 of different periods. 



His memoirs also cover a wide geographical range, as 

 specimens from many regions were submitted to him. and 



