638 Evolution in the Vegetable Kingdom. (July, 
madrepores and other animal remains, but when at last the era of 
science dawned toward the close of the eighteenth century Blu- 
menbach had for many years been sounding the key-note of pa- 
lezontological truth in the animal kingdom before Schlotheim took 
up the refrain in favor of plants. 
_ When we consider the present state of knowledge respecting 
the geological strata of the earth’s crust, we can scarcely realize 
that but two generations ago comparatively nothing was known 
on this subject. Geology was not yet born. The investigators 
of the last century were really not discussing the geologic age of 
fossil remains. With those who studied fossil plants the assump- 
tion was universal that they were plants that grew somewhere in 
the world only a few thousand years ago at most, plants such as 
either grew then in the countries where their remains were found 
or in other countries from which they had been brought by one 
agency or another, generally that of the Flood, or else, as some 
finally conceived, had been destroyed by these agencies, so as to 
have no exact living representatives. 
{n the year 1804 appeared Baron von Schlotheim’s “ Flora der 
Vorwelt,” as it is now universally quoted, although the author 
himself merely entitled it a “ description of remarkable plant im- 
pressions and petrifactions—a contribution to the flora of the 
former (or primeval) world.” To us this seems modest enough, 
but in view of the history of palzontology, the second part of 
this title amounted to a bold declaration, and accordingly we find 
him defending it in his introduction by these words: “The pet- 
rifactions which so early engaged the attention of investigators, 
and which, without doubt, afforded one of the first incentives to 
the founding of mineral collections and to the earnest study of 
_ mineralogy and geology, have, as is well known, since Walch - 
began to arrange them systematically, been for a long time, as 
well in as out of Germany, almost wholly neglected. They were 
content to regard them as incontestable proofs of the Deluge, 
which closed all further investigation until they were at last com- 
pelled to explain their occurrence through other great natural 
operations which had probably been going on earlier and more 
universally: than the flood described in the Bible, and influencing 
the formation of the upper strata of the earth’s crust; and more 
~ recent observations and investigations have even led us to the 
i y probable supposition that they may be the remains of an 
