190 



THE AMERICAN NATURALIST [Vol. XL 



Discoveries which Suggested the Preparation of this 

 Paper 



The discoveries which suggested the preparation of this paper 

 were described in a previous paper read before the Botanical 

 Society of America at the Philadelphia meeting, on December 

 30th, 1904.1 During the autumn of that year an interesting 

 section of Cretaceous deposits was found exposed in the Andrp- 

 vette clay pit, at Kreischerville, Staten Island, N. Y. At this 

 locality the deposits consist of irregularly stratified sands and 

 clays, in one part of which occurs a lens-shaped bed of closely 

 packed vegetable debris, consisting of leaves, cone scales, twigs, 

 amber, charred wood, and lignite. At that time s])ecial attention 

 was given to the amber and tlie otlier remains were mei-ely exam- 

 ined superficiallv and brieHy mentioned. ihe suggestion ^^as 

 made by Dr. Jeffrey that eritieal examination of the lignitic frag- 

 ments would probably produce interesting residts, and this sug- 

 gestion led to two joint visits to Kreischerville during the past 

 year and tlie collection oF a large amount of new material, in part 

 from the original Lnalitv and the remainder from the nearby 



Object and Scope of the ESTi(iATU)N 



One of the great difficulties in connection with any attempt to 

 determine satisfactorily the relationships of pakieobotanical speci- 

 mens is due to the fact that such specimens are nearly always 

 more or less fragmentary, being represented only by dismembered 

 parts or organs of plants, and seldom or never by a complete 

 individual organism. Under such conditions it is not surprising 

 that descriptions based upon superficial characters only have fre- 

 quently resulted in erroneous generic determinations; different 

 parts of the same species have often been described under two or 

 more specific or generic names; or occasionally a single specific 



' Arthur HoUick. "The Occurrence and Origin of Amber in the Eastern 

 United States." Published in Amer. Nat., vol. 29, pp. 137-145, pis. 1-3, 1905. 



