go 6 
Slopes.—On the True Nature of the 
One or two general considerations arise from this work. Moral reflec¬ 
tions as to the value of most determinations of fossil plant-impressions 
are perhaps out of place, but it seems a good opportunity to urge that 
the lists published by palaeobotanists should be printed in two forms, and 
that the names of species of leaves, stems, &c., of which there is a reason¬ 
able security of determination, should be differentiated from those in which 
there is no guarantee at all that the actual nature of the plant has been 
discovered. Any tri-nominal system is cumbrous, but those who publish on 
fossil plants might print their names in type of two kinds, which would 
indicate which species are doubtful. I should like to suggest that, instead 
of using italics or ordinary capitals, as is usual in printing the names of 
species and genera, such doubtful plant-impressions should be printed in 
Gothic lettering. This would indicate that our knowledge about them 
is mediaeval, of the Dark Ages, and would further save the inconvenience 
of tri-nominals, while it would indicate immediately the difference be¬ 
tween the established and the doubtful determinations. As information 
accrued about a specimen it could readily be trahsferred to the clear, Latin 
italics. 
Thus the transference of <®pf)l0glO00Um grantllatum, Heer to Pinus 
granulata (Heer) would indicate that an exceedingly doubtful determina¬ 
tion had been replaced b^ one with some scientific basis. Any worker in 
another branch of science, seeing <©♦ gTfttttllatUttl in Gothic, would be 
warned at least to look into the grounds for the determination for himself 
before he—let us imagine—used the record for his stratigraphic work in 
correlating horizons, or in writing up the early history of the Ophio- 
glossaceae, when he would otherwise assume that the living genus was 
represented in Cretaceous times in the Amboy clays of North America. 
This is merely an illustration of what is very widely spread in fossil 
botany, but it may serve to give point to the general proposition that the 
time has come when it would be of real service to the science to attempt 
a conscientious distinction between valuable and doubtful determinations, 
and that Gothic lettering might give us an easy indicator. The need for 
this is all the greater because the results of palaeobotany touch so many 
other fields of research in animal palaeontology, geology, and palaeo- 
geography, as well as botany itself. Workers from these other fields are 
seldom able to estimate the evidence that they are taking to build into 
their own work, even had they the time to go into the details, and thus 
a single error gets widely disseminated. Often it is not entirely the fault 
of the one who originally described the fossil, for he may say in his text 
that the nature of the specimen is doubtful and that, in default of better 
evidence, he gives a certain name with hesitation. That name, however, 
once given, is quoted and put into lists without being in any way dis* 
tinguished from the rest, and the results are detrimental to the advance of 
