(35) 



is displayed in swinging frames which are placed so as to 

 correspond in a general way to the sequence of the cases of 

 the synoptic collection already described ; thus, the first stand 

 is near the first museum case as one enters the west hall from 

 the top of the staircase. All of the plant groups are here 

 represented by those members that occur locally, and the 

 characteristics of the several groups as mentioned under the 

 Synoptic Collection also apply here. 



3. THE MUSEUM OF FOSSIL BOTANY 



This collection, installed in the basement, is designed to 

 show the successive stages of evolution through which the 

 ancestors of our living flora have passed since the time of 

 the first appearance of plant life on the earth, as far as the 

 remains of extinct plants have been preserved. The general 

 arrangement adopted is therefore based upon the sequence of 

 the geological time divisions : Eozoic, Paleozoic, Mesozoic 

 and Neozoic, and their subdivisions into periods ; Laurentian, 

 Cambrian, Lower Silurian, Upper Silurian, Devonian, Car- 

 boniferous, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, Tertiary, Quater- 

 nary and Modern. This arrangement is therefore geolog- 

 ical, but incidentally it is also biological, and follows the 

 same system as that on which the synoptic collection of the 

 museum of systematic botany is arranged, inasmuch as the 

 plants of the earlier periods are low in the scale of life, con- 

 sisting of thallophytes and pteridophytes and plants of uncer- 

 tain botanical determination, while those which appear in the 

 successively later periods are of successively higher and more 

 complex types, represented by cycads, conifers and both mono- 

 cotyledonous and dicotyledonous plants closely related to our 

 living flora. 



The series of exhibits begins in the first cases to the left as 

 one enters the east hall of the basement. The sequence of 

 the specimens in the wall cases corresponds to that of the 

 floor cases. 



In floor- and wall-cases Nos. 1 to 4 may be seen representa- 

 tives of Eozoic and Paleozoic Time : Laurentian, Cambrian, 



