— 3383 — 
Age of the Flora. 
The most striking features of the Gangamopteris, or older Gond- 
wana, flora (1) are its relative geographical isolation and its unifor- 
mity in composition. Both of these remarkable features are no doubt 
due more or less directly to the conditions of the origin of the flora, 
the chief and by far the most important of which was the severity 
of the climate antecedent to or very probably concurreni with its 
development. 
The Gangamoptleris fiora is now known to have flourished in a 
state of relative purity in the coalfields of India, in Queensland, New 
South Wales, and Victoria in Australia, in Tasmania, in German and 
Portuguese East Africa, Portuguese South-East Africa, Rhodesia, Zulu- 
land, the Transvaal, the Orange River Colony, Natal and Cape Colony 
in South Africa, and in Argentina and Brazil in South America (2). 
Its presence is also indicated in Kashmir, Afghanistan and Persia 
in Southern Asia, and in Borneo and Western Australia, though the 
palezobotanical material from these regions is still very meager. 
The great uniformity in the composition of this fiora and the 
extraordinary degree of identity in its species in these distant regions 
has long since been recognized as necessitating the existence of land 
connections along which these varied types of terrestrial plants could 
distribute themselves with such facility as to enable the flora to 
preserve its composition practically en masse. The evidence afforded 
by the flora is corroborated by the distributional testimony of the 
vertebrates, also characteristic of the same series. 
Indeed the probability of a former land connection in the Southern 
hemisphere between these continental regions of the Gondwana fiora 
(1) «Gangamopteris» is herc employed instead of the name «Glossopteris», introduced 
hy Neumayr, to designate the older or Palaeozoic portion of the Gondwana floras, for the 
following reasons: The genus Glossoptcris is not confined to the Permo-Carboniferous 
formations, but is found to pass up into the Rhetic of Tonquin. In the early paleeobo- 
tanical literature the name Glossopteris was generically applied to the genus now called 
Lepidophyllum, and, later, after its present application, it was contused with the genus 
Sagenopteris of the Triassic and Jurassic formations. The Mesozoic floras with Glossopteris 
present either a cosmopolitan composition or mingled cosmopolitan types and Gondwana 
survivors, and are distinct from the older with Gangamopteris. The genus Gangamopteris 
is nearly always and everywhere present in the Palaeozoic Gondwana flora, and is 
characteristic of the series. It is a large, easily recognized plant and is practically free 
from confusion with other genera. 
Above all, it is not known to transgress the palaeobotanical break between the 
Permian and the Mesozoic ; so that it is directly and definitively applicable to the older 
or Palaeozoic portion of the Gondwana flora throughout its province. 
(2) Announcement is just made of the recognition of Phyllotheca, and possibly Schizo- 
neura also. among fossils from the Falkland Islands. See Nathorst, Bull, Geol. Inst., 
Upsala, vol. VIL. 1906, p. 72. 
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