368 SKETCH OF PALKOBOTANY. 



TII.-HISTORICAL REVIEW OE PAiEOBOTANICAL DIS- 

 COVERY. 



A. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. 



Paleobotany is a science of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless its 

 dawn at the beginning of this century was preceded by a long fading 

 twilight extending entirely through the eighteenth. But even when we 

 consider the nineteenth century alone, its progress shows us that it 

 has as yet scarcely entered into the full light of day. If we judge it by 

 its literature, not always a safe guide, but certainly the best one we 

 possess, we find that the first half of this century produced less than 

 one-fourth as much as the third quarter, and this less than the still un- 

 finished fourth quarter. If we measure the literature, as we may 

 roughly do, by the number of titles of books, memoirs, and papers that 

 have been contributed to it, we will arrive at a rude conception of the 

 accelerated rate at which the science is advancing. 



Ignoring for the i^reseat certain vague allusions that were made to 

 the subject by the ancients and by writers down to the close of the 

 seventeenth century, some hundred and fifty works might be named 

 belonging to the eighteenth century that bear in a more or less direct 

 way upon vegetable fossils, but this would exhaust the enumeration, 

 A nearly equal number could be uained which appeared during the first 

 quarter of the nineteenth century, while fully two hundred titles, includ- 

 ing many large works, issued from the press during the second quarter 

 of the century. And yet, as already shown, this was but the beginning, 

 and the true season of interest and activity did not set in until the sixth 

 decade, since which time this activity has steadily, if not uniformly, 

 increased until the present, when the number of works and minor 

 memoirs relating to fossil plants that see the light each year often 

 reaches a hundred. 



Although the number of persons who have interested themselves in 

 paleobotany and have published more or less upon it is very great, while 

 those who have become eminent in this field may be counted by scores, 

 still, if we confine ourselves to such only as may be called pre-eminent, 

 who have devoted their lives chiefly and successfully to it, and have 

 either constituted its true founders or enriched in an especial manner 

 its literature and perfected its methods, we may restrict them to eight 

 or ten. If called upon to specify, we might reduce this enumeration to 

 the following great names which stand forth as the true leaders and 

 heroes of this science : Adolphe Theodore Brongniart, Heinrich Eobert 

 Goppert, Franz Unger, Leo Lesquereux, Oswald Heer, Abramo Massa- 

 longo, Baron Gonstantin von Ettingshausen, and the Marquis Gaston 

 de Saporta. Whether we consider the number of works actually pro- 

 duced, the volume of this literature, the quality or importance of their 



