DEVELOPMENT OF PALEOBOTANY IN THE ILLINOIS BASIN 19 



it while employed by the Survey. After Noe's death, part of the collection was 

 transferred to Urbana, but the rest was taken to the Field Museum of Natural 

 History a few years ago. 



Other Studies of Illinois Compressions 



There were still very few American paleobotanists in the United States in 

 the early 1930s, but improvements in transportation permitted a number of them, 

 as well as some Europeans, to collect and/ or study plants from the Illinois Basin; 

 interest thus continued in compression-impression plants. 



Darrah (1969) became interested in compression-impression plants in 1926 

 before his Iowa coal- ball studies began, and he recalled: 



I became interested in the Mazon Creek flora in about 1930. While a student 

 I was employed part-time by Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh to begin to put a 

 fossil plant collection in some order. It was a very famous Belgian collec- 

 tion gathered by a Baron de Bayet. He had purchased, sometime about I89O, a 

 considerable amount of material from Mazon Creek. Around 1932 and 1933 I 

 was attempting to correlate the floras of the Allegheny formations with 

 those of Henry County, Missouri, and Illinois. Between August 1929 and May 

 193^ I tried to locate and collect at as many classic localities mentioned 

 or described by Lesquereux, David White, and I. C. White as could be iden- 

 tified, about 175 in all. In 1932 I made my first collection in the Wilming- 

 ton strip mines, then close to Coal City [Illinois]. In 193^ I went to 

 Harvard and there found a huge new collection gathered by Frederick 0. 

 Thompson of Des Moines. I became an intimate friend of Thompson over the 

 years and collected with him in the ever-enlarging strip mines in 1937- 

 1939* The account in my monograph indicates how much I depended on Thomp- 

 son's collections and the way he gathered them. 



Compte Rendu of the Second International Congress of Carboniferous Strati- 

 graphy and Geology, held in 1935, contains articles by Jongmans (1937a, b) and 

 Darrah (1937a) that mention Illinois fossil plants. Darrah (1937b, 1938a) and 

 Arnold (1938) also made contributions on fertile structures from Mazon Creek. 

 Arnold wrote: 



I do not recall how many collecting trips I have made to Illinois, but 

 while collecting was good near Braidwood and Coal City I would make annual 

 trips to pick up the "Mazon Creek" nodules. We finally amassed a rather 

 sizable collection, and I think we have somewhere around 2000 catalogued 

 specimens. Our collection is not a bad one, although it does not approach 

 in size some of the real large ones around the country. 



Joseph M. Wood worked up the Mazon Creek collection at the University of Mich- 

 igan, which included Arnold's fossils. 



Two of Noe's students completed their theses on compression-impression 

 floras of the Illinois Basin, Raymond Jans sen in 1937 and Franklin C. MacKnight 

 in 1938. MacKnight's study dealt with the flora of the Herrin ("Grape Creek") 

 Coal near Danville, Illinois ; Janssen's dealt with Pennsylvanian plants from the 

 basin. MacKnight is now at the University of Buffalo. 



Janssen continued his interest in Illinois Basin plants and published sev- 

 eral papers (Noe and Jans sen, 1938; Janssen, 1939, 1940a, b, 1945, 1946). He 



