10 



HISTORICAL SKETCH. 



[CH. 



honourable title of a founder of modern Palaeobotany'." If we 

 look back through a few decades, and peruse the pages of Lindley 

 and Button's classic work^ on the Fossil flora of Great Britain, 

 a book which is indispensable to foSsil botanists, and read the 

 description of such a genus as Sigillaria or Stigmaria; or if we 

 extend our retrospect to an earlier period and read Woodward's 

 description of an unusually good specimen of a Lepidodendron, 

 and finally take stock of our present knowledge of such plants, 

 we realise what enormous progress has been made in palaeo- 

 botanical studies. Lindley and Hutton, in the preface to the 

 first volume of the Flora, claim to have demonstrated that both 

 Sigillaria and Stigmaria were plants with " the highest degree 

 of organization, such as Gactaeae, or Euphorbiaceae, or even 

 Asclepiadeae" ; Woodward describes his Lepidodendron (Fig. 1) as 

 " an ironstone, black and flat, and wrought over one surface very 

 finely, with a strange cancellated work"." Thanks largely to 



Fig. 1. Four leaf-cushions of a Lepidodendron. Drawn from a specunen in 

 the Woodward Collection, Cambridge. (Nat. size.) 



the work of Binney, Carruthers, Hooker, Williamson, and to the 

 labours of continental botanists, we are at present almost as 

 familiar with Lepidodendron and several other Coal-Measure 



1 Solms-Laubach (95), p. 442. 

 3 Woodward (1729), Pt. ii. p. 106. 



Lindley and Hutton (31). 



