DEVELOPMENT OF PALEOBOTANY IN THE ILLINOIS BASIN 29 



Washington University Studies 



While Henry N. Andrews was a botany graduate student at Washington Uni- 

 versity in St. Louis, taxonomist Robert E. Woodson encouraged him to go to Eng- 

 land to study with the noted paleobotanist, H. Hamshaw Thomas at Cambridge 

 University in 1937. Andrews wrote us: 



I believe the first time that I actually saw a coal ball and made peel 

 preparations was when I was a student at Cambridge in 1937-38. Hamshaw 

 Thomas suggested that I look into the anatomy of the secondary wood of the 

 pteridosperms , and I obtained some coal-ball specimens of Lyginopteris 

 oldhamia from Hemingway. 



Andrews' doctoral thesis, which was later published (1940), discussed, along with 

 the pteridosperm petrifactions from Great Britain, some coal- ball material from 

 the Illinois Basin supplied by Schopf . Schopf recalled one of his early meetings 

 with Andrews, "I had gotten more coal-ball material, and I invited him to look at 

 some of it. As I recall, he took back with him the material he later described as 

 Heterangium americanum [Andrews, 1942b]." 



Andrews joined the staff of the Henry Shaw School of Botany at Washington 

 University and the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, where he established 

 their first paleobotanical program. For most of his 25 years at the university he 

 was Dean of the School of Botany. 



Andrews and his students contributed significantly to the early studies of 

 coal-ball floras of Iowa, Kansas, and the Illinois Basin (Andrews, 1951) and to 

 the compression-impression flora of the basin (Andrews, 1943; Andrews and Mamay, 

 1948). 



The first time large numbers of specimens of a given plant were examined 

 to establish variation in anatomy and dimensions was in the study of Lepidoden- 

 dron scleroticum by Eloise Pannell (1942), a student of Andrews. The coal balls 

 came from the Illinois Herrin (No. 6) Coal, and Andrews wrote: 



Eloise Pannell came from Carbondale and had been told about coal balls by 

 her professor there. We went to the Pyramid Mine near Pinckneyville and 

 we found coal balls in the dump where the coal was cleaned and explored 

 the seam itself. We made several trips there during the two years that she 

 was at Washington University. 



Andrews and Pannell (1942) also described cellular preservation within the mega- 

 spore of Lepidoearpon. 



During World War II Andrews wrote the delightful book, Ancient Plants and 

 the World They Lived In (Andrews, 1947). Andrews was teaching mathematics to 

 servicemen, and, in order to maintain contact with fossil plants, he wrote in the 

 evenings about areas of paleobotany that keenly interested him. In 1951 he pre- 

 pared the most detailed account of the history of American coal-ball studies to 

 date, which contained an extensive list of flora and a bibliography. 



Another of Andrews' students, Robert W. Baxter, who later taught at the 

 University of Kansas at Lawrence, studied Sphenophyllum and pteridosperm stems 

 and fructifications, particularly the Medullosaceae (Baxter, 1948, 1949). Plants 

 from the basin were included in both studies. Baxter wrote concerning the develop- 

 ment of his interest in paleobotany: 



I had done nearly all of my undergraduate work in botany under R. E. Wood- 

 son through whose help I later put in a year at the University of Hawaii 



