wAuu.] PKELIMINAKY REMARKS. 365 



has becu the growing importance of this same consideration, becoming 

 more apparent at every step, that has impelled and encouraged me 

 throughout its laborious preparation. 



It is especially in America that this want of methodical arrange- 

 ment in paleobotany has been most keenly felt. The most important 

 works on fossil plants have been published since the last attempt of 

 this kind was made in Europe, and very little of our knowledge of the 

 science has ever been embodied in any of the works of this class. The 

 literature of this country is scattered throughout the scientific serials 

 and official publications of the various geological surveys, and the few 

 more comprehensive worts that have appeared not only leave this branch 

 of the subject in great doubt and confusion, but contain, besides, many 

 fundamental misconceptions and positive errors. 



Whatever degree of inadequacy paleobotany may reveal for the solu- 

 tion of geologic questions, no one can deny that its value can never 

 be fairly judged until its materials are first so classified and arranged 

 that all the light that can be shed by them on any given problem can be 

 directed full upon it and the problem deliberately studied by it. When 

 this can be accomplished, even should it do no more than emphasize 

 the insuJOSciency of the data, it would, even then, have the effect of 

 pointing out the proper direction of future research with a view to in- 

 creasing the material and perfecting the data. This work has been 

 conceived and is being conducted primarily to this end of thus focaliz- 

 ing, as it were, the knowledge already extant in this department of re- 

 search, and of bringing it to bear with its full force, however feeble 

 this may be, upon the questions to whose solution it is capable of being 

 legitimately applied. 



v.— FUTURE PROSPECTS OF PALEOBOTANY. 



While it is particularly as a contribution to American science, and 

 with special reference to its application to American geology that the 

 work has been undertaken, still, for many and obvious reasons it was 

 found impossible to confine it to purely American facts. The useful- 

 ness, for the ])urpose intended, of any such compilation increases in an 

 accelerated ratio as its scope is expanded, and its value only begins to 

 lie really gr^'at when it approaches complete universality and compasses 

 the whole field of facts so far as known within its particular department. 

 While this would be true of any science, it is conspicuously so of paleo- 

 botany, where, more than anywhere else, the record is so notably incom- 

 plete. A more special reason in this case lies in the fact, only recently 

 so strongly felt by paleobotanists, that the floras of the successive epochs 

 in the history of the earth have been differentiating and becoming more 

 and more varied according to their degree of territorial separation, so 

 that in studying them in reverse order we find greater and greater uni- 



