68 A. Gray—Memorial of Oswald Heer. 
time also appeared a paper, in the Journal of the Geological 
Society, on certain fossil plants of the Isle of Wight. For the 
benefit of his health, always delicate and then much impaired, 
he passed the winter of 1854-55 in Madeira, and on his return 
published a paper on the fossil plants of that island, and an 
article on the probable origin of the actual flora and fauna of 
the Azores, Madeira, and the Canaries, In this and in his 
work, published in 1860, on Tertiary Climates in their Relation 
to Vegetation (which the next year appeared also in a French 
translation by his young friend Gaudin), Heer brought out his 
theory of a Miocene Atlantis. His more extensive and popu- 
lar treatise upon past climates as illustrated by vegetable pale- 
ontology, his Urwelt der Schweiz,—a vivid portraiture of the 
past of his native country,—appeared in 1865, and afterwards 
in a revised French edition, with his friend Gaudin (who die 
soon after) for collaborator as well as translator. There was 
also an English translation by Heywood, published in 1876, 
and, indeed, it is said to have been translated into six lan- 
uages. 
. if 1877 Heer completed his Flora Fossilis Helvetie, a square- 
folio volume with seventy plates, which extended and supple- 
- mented his Tertiary Flora of that country, being devoted to 
the illustration of the fossil plants of the Carboniferous, the 
Triassic, the Jurassic, and the Cretaceous, as well as the Eocene 
formations. 
The life-long delicacy of Heer’s health prevented his making 
any extensive explorations in person. But materials for his 
investigation came to him in even embarrassing abundance, not 
only from his own country,—where, even before he was widely 
known (as his fellow countryman and his distinguished fellow 
worker in paleo-botany, Lesquereux, informs us), a lady opened 
upon her property, near Lausanne, quarries and tunnels expressly 
for the discovery and collection of fossil plants, and sent them 
by tons to Zurich,—but from all parts of the world collections 
were pressed upon him, and his whole time and strength were 
given to their study. In this way he became interested in the 
Arctic fossil flora, of which he became the principal investiga- 
tor and expounder. His first essay in the domain which he has 
made so peculiarly his own was in a paper on certain fossil — 
planis of Vancouver Island and British Columbia, published 
in 1865; and in 1868 he brought out the first of that most 
important series of memoirs upon the ancient floras of Arctic 
. America, Greenland, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Arctic and 
Subarctic Asia, ete.; which, collected, make up the seven 
quarto volumes of the Flora Fossilis Arctica. The seventh 
volume of this monumental work was brought to a conclusion 4 
only a few months before the author's death, . 
eee = 3) 
eae 
