XII 
THE PALAEONTOLOGICAL RECORD 
II. PLANTS 
By D. H. Scort, F.R.S. 
President of the Linnean Society. 
THERE are several points of view from which the subject of the 
present essay may be regarded. We may consider the fossil record 
of plants in its bearing: I. on the truth of the doctrine of Evolution; 
II. on Phylogeny, or the course of Evolution; III. on the theory of 
Natural Selection. The remarks which follow, illustrating certain 
aspects only of an extensive subject, may conveniently be grouped 
under these three headings. 
J. Tue Trutrs or EvoLurion. 
When The Origin of Species was written; it was necessary to 
show that the Geological Record was favourable to, or at least 
consistent with, the Theory of Descent. The point is argued, closely 
and fully, in Chapter x. “On the Imperfection of the Geological 
Record,” and Chapter xt “On the Geological Succession of Organic 
Beings”; there is, however, little about plants in these chapters. 
At the present time the truth of Evolution is no longer seriously 
disputed, though there are writers, like Reinke, who insist, and 
rightly so, that the doctrine is still only a belief, rather than an 
established fact of science. Evidently, then, however little the 
Theory of Descent may be questioned in our own day, it is desirable 
to assure ourselves how the case stands, and in particular how far the. 
evidence from fossil plants has grown stronger with time. 
As regards direct evidence for the derivation of one species from 
another, there has probably been little advance since Darwin wrote, 
at least so we must infer from the emphasis laid on the discontinuity 
of successive fossil species by great systematic authorities like 
Grand’Eury and Zeiller in their most recent writings. We must 
either adopt the mutationist views of those authors (referred to in 
1 J. Reinke, ‘‘ Kritische Abstammunggslehre,” Wiesner-Festschrift, p. 11, Vienna, 1908, 
