THE GEOLOGIST. 



OCTOBER 1863. 



FERNS IN COAL-SHALES. 



By the Editor. 



It is very much to be regretted that amongst our rising geologists 

 we have none who are turning, as far as we know, their attention 

 devotedly to fossil plants. There is a wide field open, and a most 

 interesting one, for since the time of Lindley and Hutton, now six- 

 arid-twenty years ago, we have had no important British work on this 

 branch of geology, and it cannot be supposed that the advance 

 made by recent botanists in that interval would not be applicable, 

 and of the highest advantage to the study of fossil vegetable remains. 

 We have quite enough shell-pickers and mammoth-hunters for a few 

 to devote their time and their energies to the ancient " flowers of the 

 fields," if flowers there were in those dreary days which some of our 

 savants picture when they tell us how the carboniferous vegetation 

 luxuriated in the warmest and densest of fogs, and the earth itself 

 was a gigantic warming-pan for the plants that grew upon it. 



The pretty fern-leaf we have figured came into our possession some 

 years ago very accidentally, so much so that we are not quite sure of 

 even its locality, and it is now deposited in the National Collection, 

 Neither in Lindley and Hutton, the figures in which are not ex- 

 quisite examples of art, nor amongst the actual specimens in the 

 British Museum cabinets, could we find anything with which it 

 seemed to accord. In Sternberg's 'Flora der Vorwelt' there ap- 

 peared to be, in plate xxxviii. fig. 1, a, b, e, a fern presenting the 

 same configuration of leaflet and the like venation, and, without 



VOL. vi. 3 A 



