4 



BRITISH EOCENE FLORA. 



work, the correctness of the results may yet be open to doubt. No author has written 

 upon similar floras without expressing his opinion of the magnitude of these difficulties. 

 Yet., many seem to have forgotten, during the progress of their work, the caution they 

 insisted on at its commencement. Nothing is more easy than to assign generic and 

 specific names to leaf-forms ; but, with such material, the determinations are so much a 

 matter of opinion that criticism or contradiction is useless. 



The publication, however, of careful drawings of fossil plants is of value; and were 

 the determinations which have been made even more doubtful and provisional in 

 character than they are at present thought to be, it is, nevertheless, a real benefit to 

 science to accurately figure and describe all the obviously different leaves and fruits that 

 have been discovered. Many fossil leaves fade, others crack and peel off from the 

 matrix ; dust can never be completely removed, and necessarily obscures the more 

 delicate venation ; indeed, these characters are so easily obliterated that without exceptional 

 care the specimens soon become valueless. Eossil fruits are from other causes equally 

 difficult of preservation. Unfortunately leaves formerly collected in quantity from 

 Corfe, Branksea, Dulwich, and many other places, are no loriger to be obtained from 

 these localities ; and almost all of the few specimens still in existence have become so 

 obscure that they give very imperfect evidence of the nature of these floras. Thus, links 

 in the history of plant-life are lost, perhaps beyond recovery. 



As long ago as 1854, Edward Eorbes, in his Anniversary Address ^ to the Geological 

 Society, called attention to the necessity of doing something with these floras. 



" Were all known fragments of distinct vegetables found in our Tertiaries mono- 

 graphed and named in the manner of those I shall have presently to mention, described 

 and figured in the lately published memoirs by Austrian Botanists, our lists would be 

 considerably increased. They certainly ought to be made the subject of a treatise, and 

 might be advantageously taken up by the Palgeontographical Society, which, as yet, 

 has given no separate memoir on British fossil plants." 



It is to be greatly regretted that no practical steps have hitherto been taken to 

 accomplish this work, as, since Professor Forbes made this suggestion, instances have 

 come under my own notice in which whole beds of leaves have been either carried away 

 by the sea, or quarried out, or deeply buried under refuse. 



It seems likely that the cautions formerly reiterated by such distinguished men as 

 Hooker, Charles Bunbury, and E. T^orbes himself, intended to direct investigation, have 

 had the practical effect of discouraging British palaeontologists from undertaking it, since 

 the only writings of importance upon our British Tertiary floras are, with the exception of 

 Bowerbank's description of the fossil fruits of the London Clay, by foreigners. Botanists 

 when consulted have very often, unintentionally no doubt, deterred collectors from 

 taking any further interest in fossil leaf-forms by the emphatic stress they have laid 

 upon the variation to which leaves belonging to the same species of plant are subject, 



1 'Quart. Joum. Geol. Soc.,' vol. x, p. Ivi. 



