26 



The Seed- Plants of the Coal 



By Dr. Dukinfield H. Scott, m.a., ll.d., f.r.s., f.g.s., 

 President of the Linnean Society. 



HE Bournemouth coast is famous for its fossil plants. I under- 



* stand that one of the most interesting of them, a British palm, 

 was described a few days ago by my friend, Sir Daniel Morris, 

 before the Geological Section of this Society, and compared with a 

 nearly allied species still living in India. 



It is much to be desired that the rich flora of these Tertiary 

 beds should be more fully investigated. Undoubtedly this will 

 lead to results of no less scientific interest than the work already 

 done on the older vegetation, to which my remarks this afternoon 

 will refer. 



The seed-plants of which I am about to speak were separated 

 by an immense interval of time from the palms and dicotyledons of 

 the Eocene flora — we go back at once to the Palaeozoic rocks. 



Although in those remote ages there were seed-plants in 

 abundance, there were no flowers, at least in the sense in which we 

 commonly and naturally use the word. Seed-plants and flowering 

 plants are by no means the same thing ; the seed had been evolved 

 for ages before the flower was arrived at. The flower, with its 

 characteristic bright colours and in many cases its sweet scent, is 

 essentially an organ adapted to cross-fertilization by insect agency. 

 There were insects enough even in the Coal period, but the great 

 dragon -flies and cockroaches of those days were not of the kind to 

 which our flower-visitors belong. It is possible that they may have 

 played some part in the conveyance of pollen even then, for a casual 

 relation between plants and insects may well have existed long 

 before they became mutually adapted to each other's needs. 



True flowering plants came in with a rush (at least so it seems 

 to us, though their evolution could not really have been sudden) 

 late in the Mesozoic period. At the time when the Cretaceous 

 rocks were being laid down, the whole face of the world was 

 changed, and everywhere flowers of types familiar to us sprang up. 

 This was the greatest revolution which the vegetable kingdom had 

 ever experienced — almost comparable to the advent of man in the 

 kingdom of animals. The victory of the flowering plants was only 

 made possible by their alliance with the highest forms of insect life, 

 which came in at about the same period. 



We are concerned to-day with a far earlier stage in evolution, at a 

 time when the vegetation of the Coal forests, for example, was of 



Delivered 26th November, igio. 



