214 THE GEOLOGICAL SUKVEY 
thi'ee essays on the Coal plants, which involved both the draw- 
ing of woodcuts and personal superintendence of sHcing and 
polishing fossils. These essays were printed in the ' Memoirs ' 
of the Geological Survey for 1848 ; two dealt \Ndth the structure 
of Stigmaria and Leyidostrohus ; the third drew a general 
comparison between the plants of the Coal and of the present 
day. Here microscopic examination of these sections of 
' coal-balls ' was made fruitful by his great knowledge of hving 
forms ; he was able to demonstrate the actual structure of the 
fossils, and as Professor W. W. Watts remarks in his Anniversary 
Address to the Geological Society, 1912, ' these memoirs differ 
from all others on the subject pubHshed at the time — or, indeed, 
long afterwards — ^in receiving unstinted praise ahke from 
geologists and from botanists.' 
Except for a return in the eighties to the ' enigmatic ' 
PacliytJieca, on which he first pubHshed in 1853, Hooker's short 
but brilhant work on fossil botany ended with his explanation 
of Trigonocar'pon, a fossil fruit of the Coal measures (in 1854-5). 
India and Kew absorbed his energies, though his early interest 
was not quenched. True that for many years the rashness of 
geological identifications led him to dub Fossil Botany ' the 
most unreliable of sciences ' ; ' but,' adds Professor Watts, 
* when, in recent years, the study of Carboniferous, Jm'assic, 
and Cretaceous plants yielded such new and starthng results 
to investigators in this country, France, Germany, and the 
United States, all his old enthusiasm returned.' 
The other part of his winter occupations in 1846-7 included 
completion of the Antarctic Flora and the Niger Flora, which 
had grown too bulky for printing more than the opening part 
in the ' Journal of Botany.' ' I have had,' he complains, ' to 
write something rather " Flowery, Bowery " for a Botanist, 
to please the *' Emancipators," but it is not very much, happily.' 
The Galapagos Florula was to appear in the Liimean Society 
Transactions, and to be followed with notes on the botanical 
distribution of the flora. Another task was the naming of 
aU his own and E. Gunn's Tasmanian Compositae and Coni- 
ferae, with publication of diagnoses of the many new species 
in the Journal, for the prospects of bringing out the Tasmanian 
