DEVELOPMENT OF PALEOBOTANY IN THE ILLINOIS BASIN 33 



terviewed for a position at Minnesota, teaching general botany. He turned 

 it down, and in turn recommended me for the position. When I accepted it, 

 realizing that there was already one morphologist-anatomist there (Ernst 

 Abbe), and that a paleobotanist (Banks) had once been there, but left two 

 years before I arrived, it was a logical move to declare myself a paleo- 

 botanist. The summer after graduating, I scrambled around collecting coal 

 balls at a number of localities and also got a number of peels from Stew- 

 art's material. These formed the nucleus of my paleobotany course. 



Of Hall's teaching, Gilbert A. Leisman of Kansas State Teachers College recalls: 



I first became interested in paleobotany while taking Hall's course at 

 Minnesota. In cutting coal balls from Iowa, I had the good fortune to find 

 a new pteridosperm male fructification and I also tried my hand at macer- 

 ating coal-ball fragments to obtain leaf cuticles. Both of these research 

 experiences really fired my enthusiasm. However, by this time I was so far 

 along in my Ph.D. research in ecology that it was impractical to change. 

 Probably the lack of Ph.D. thesis research in paleobotany was my biggest 

 drawback when I started serious paleobotanical research at Kansas State 

 Teachers College. I almost literally had to train myself in the basics of 

 research and literature search. Conversely, many ecological concepts and 

 principles have proven useful to me in paleobotanical research. 



Hall shifted his primary research interest to Cretaceous palynology in the 1950s. 



The last students at Urbana to begin their doctoral studies with Stewart 

 were Benton M. Stidd and Julian M. Frankenberg. Stidd completed his master's 

 work with Leisman (Leisman and Stidd, 1967) and his doctorate with Phillips, study- 

 ing the morphology and anatomy of the frond of Psaronius (Stidd, 19 71) . He also 

 discovered the first young sporophytes of Psaronius (Stidd and Phillips, 1968). Af- 

 ter two years at the University of Minnesota, where Stidd and Hall (19 70 a, b) col- 

 laborated on papers on seeds and microsynangia, Stidd joined the biology faculty 

 at Western Illinois University at Macomb. Frankenberg completed his work with 

 Donald A. Eggert, a former student of Delevoryas, studying petrified Stigmaria 

 from North America (Frankenberg and Eggert, 1969). Slides and figured specimens 

 of coal-ball plants described by Stewart and his students are located (with some 

 exceptions)in the paleobotanical collections of the Botany Department in Morrill 

 Hall at the University of Illinois. 



Stewart's long-range plans were projected toward a systematic study of the 

 coal-ball flora of the United States. As a result of his collecting activities with 

 students, Stewart brought together the most extensive research collection of coal 

 balls from the Illinois Basin, along with representative material from many of the 

 coal-ball localities outside the basin area. Stewart explained: 



Extensive coal-ball collecting was prompted by my desire to get away from 

 describing a coal-ball flora within a single coal ball and to have several 

 specimens of a species as a basis for description, not just one specimen. 

 This led naturally to mass collecting and the investigation of ontogenetic 

 stages of the organisms we were studying. Without the help of Jim Schopf 

 and especially Bob Kosanke and others at the Geological Survey, there 

 would not have been the collections we have today. It was a report from 

 Jack Simon (then with the Coal Section) that put us on to the coal balls 

 from the Sahara mine. 



