1885.] Evolution in the Vegetable Kingdom, — 641 
few exceptions, adopted by subsequent palzo-botanists but never 
by botanists proper. 
The most powerful antagonism to this effort of Brongniart to 
confirm Lamarckian principles from the phytologic side thirty-one 
years before the appearance of Darwin’s “Origin of Species” 
was offered by the eminent English botanist, Dr. John Lindley, 
who found a fitting occasion to meet the great French palzon- 
tologist on his own ground while engaged with William Hutton 
in the preparation of their “Fosssil Flora of Great Britain,” 
1831—37. Of this truly great work we are here concerned only 
with certain discussions which were directed against the then 
infant doctrine of biologic evolution in the vegetable kingdom, 
and which were not only marked with great acrimony, but were 
allowed to influence and to warp the classification adopted by the 
authors into forms which even to botanists now appear ridicu- 
lous. The introductory remarks in the first volume, as well as 
much of the general discussion throughout the work, are charac- 
terized by a most astonishing and apparently willful ignorance of 
the true principles of palzo-phytology as they were set forth by 
Brongniart, Sternberg and even Schlotheim, and which are now 
universally accepted. 
One of Dr. Lindley’s remarkable aberrations was the perti- 
nacity with which he contended for the existence of cactaceous 
and euphorbiaceous plants in the coal measures. It is true 
that Parkinson had seen a fancied resemblance between cer- 
tain stems and those of large cacti, and similar guesses had 
been made by Volkmann, Walch and other authors of the 
eighteenth century, when it was supposed that the counterpart of 
every fossil plant must be found in the living flora, but all these 
imaginings had been long since laid aside only to be revived by 
the leading botanist of Europe. 
The theory of a former tropical climate in England and on the 
continent of Europe was assailed, the existence of tree-ferns in 
the Carboniferous was denied, the relation of the Calamite to 
the Equisetaceæ questioned, and many other tolerably well estab- 
lished generalizations were remanded to the domain of dou 
and discussion. 
The true secret of this sweeping skepticism is, however, not 
far to seek. It is found in the more general denial, which was 
finally made, of the conclusion to which the acceptance of these 
