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A. Gray-—Memorral of Oswald Heer. 69 
Heer’s researches into the fossil botany of the tertiary deposits 
were very important in their bearings. ey made it certain 
that our actual temperate floras round the world had a com- 
present ; and they leave the similarities and the dissimilarities 
of the temperate floras of the Old and the New World to be 
explained as simple consequences of established facts. Thus 
Heer himself did away with his own hypothesis of a continen- 
tal Atlantis by bringing to light the facts which proved that 
there was no need of it. And, while thus justifying the ideas 
which had been brought forward in one of the Memoirs of the 
American Academy (in 1859) before these fossil data were 
known, he was not slow to adopt and to extend the tentative 
views which he had confirmed. 
A list of Heer’s scientific publications is given in the Botan- © 
isches Centralblatt, No. 5, for 1884. They are seventy-seven 
in number, besides the seven quarto volumes of the Flora Fos- 
silis Arctica, which comprise a considerable number of inde- 
pendent memoirs. These works make an era in vegetable 
paleontology. Their crowning general interest is, that they 
bring the vegetation of the past into direct connection with the 
present. 
Although he lived to a good old age, and was never inactive, | 
Heer was for most of his life an invalid, suffering from pulmo- 
nary disease. For the last twelve vears his work was carried 
on at his bedside or from his bed, assisted by a devoted and 
accomplished daughter; he seldom left his house, except to 
pass the last two winters in the milder climate of Italy. Last 
summer, having finished his Arctic Fossil Flora, in the hope of 
recruiting his exhausted strength he was removed to the most 
sheltered spot on the shores of the lake of Geneva, but without 
benefit. He died at Lausanne, at his brother’s house, on the 
27th of September, 1883. It has been well said of him, in a 
tribute which a personal friend and fellow naturalist paid to his 
memory, that “a man more lovable, more sympathetic, and a 
life more laborious and pure, one could scarcely imagine.” 
Heer was elected into the American Academy in May, 1877. 
He is botanically commemorated in a genus of beautiful 
Melastomaceous plants, indigenous to Mexico. 
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* The first and second volumes of the Flora Fossilis Arctica appeared in 1868— ; 
7. “Sequoia and its History,” in which the writer’s earlier view was extended 
and made clearer, and Heer’s results noted, was published in 1872. 
