No. 415.] REVIEWS OF RECENT LITERATURE. 607 
the Museum of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society at York. The 
study of the material contained in these two museums has been 
supplemented by an examination of specimens in the Museums of 
Cambridge, Whitby, Scarborough, Oxford, Manchester, Newcastle, 
and Leeds, all of which are rich in collections of Yorkshire coast 
plants, and also of specimens in the collections at Paris, Lund, 
Stockholm, and other continental museums. 
The author’s experience shows that the identification of type 
specimens which have become so widely distributed is a very diffi- 
cult and often fruitless task, and his appeal for some definite system 
whereby such important material may be centralized and the types 
thereby preserved and made accessible, is one which must meet with 
strong sympathy from paleobotanists elsewhere. 
he Cliff sections of Jurassic plant-bearing strata exposed along 
the Yorkshire coast from Whitby to a few miles south of Scarbor- 
ough have afforded unusually rich data bearing upon our knowledge 
of Mesozoic vegetation, and Mr. Seward points out that the flora of 
this particular district is the richest among Mesozoic floras from 
British localities, both as regards the number of species and the 
abundance of material, and that it is scarcely surpassed by any 
assemblage of fossil plants from extra-British regions. The large 
amount of this material which has found its way into various Euro- 
pean collections has resulted at various times in partial descriptions 
by Brongniart, Sternberg, and other continental paleobotanists. 
As long ago as 1828, Brongniart described twenty-two species of 
these plants, and during the period from 1831-37, Lindley and 
Hutton published forty-seven species. In 1874 Professor Phillips 
recorded ninety-five species in the last edition of his work. At dif- 
ferent times various other authors have published minor lists, but 
the most important contribution from a numerical point of view was 
that of Fox-Strangways and Barrows, who recorded one hundred and 
seven species in Vol. II (Yorkshire) of the Geological Survey Memoirs. 
` But up to the present date no systematic attempt has been made to 
deal with the flora exhaustively and ascertain its geographical dis- 
tribution ; to compare it with older and younger floras, as also with 
recent yere. to determine the conditions under which the plants 
grew, and to recognize the most characteristic species with a view 
to their employment as indices of geological age. This task has 
now been assumed by Mr. Seward after the lapse of forty-two years, 
and in the catalogue before us we are — with the initial 
results of his studies. 
