170 The Meeting of the British Association. 
meetings are taken up with the reading of miscellaneous papers, 
even if these are grouped according to branches of the science, as 
has been the custom for some years. 
President’s Address to Section K. 
The President, Mr. Seward, took the very wise course of devoting 
his Address to a topic on which he is a recognised authority, and while 
maintaining the tradition of making a wide survey and drawing 
together a number of scattered facts, produced a really valuable 
contribution to his branch of science. As Professor Balfour said in 
moving the vote of thanks, the delivery of this address marks a 
distinct step in the progress of Palaeobotany. 
The general subject of the address was “ the geographical 
distribution of the floras of the past.” We are familiar with out¬ 
lines of the geological history of the plant-world as it is met with in 
the north temperate regions, especially in Europe, and with 
sketches of the geographical distribution of the present-day flora of 
the earth, but no attempt has hitherto been made to treat the 
botanical history of the world as a whole. Of course in the present 
extremely fragmentary state of of our knowledge (not to speak of 
the imperfection of the geological record), and within the limits of 
a British Assocation Presidential Address, it is not possible to do 
more than present the merest outline of this gigantic subject, but 
Mr. Seward’s sketch is none the less of the greatest interest and 
value. 
We cannot in the present notice do more than refer to a very 
few of the points brought out by Mr. Seward. The general method 
pursued was to divide the world for the sake of convenience into 
twenty-two areas, separated horizontally by the limits between the 
arctic, temperate, sub-tropical and tropical zones, and vertically by 
arbitrary lines; and then to construct tables, one for each of the 
well-preserved characteristic floras of the past, in which the occur¬ 
rence of characteristic fossil types in these different geographical 
regions is shewn. 
In the Devonian and Lower Carboniferous Floras taken 
together, the preponderance of Pteridophytes, largely of very 
ancient synthetic types, (the ancestors of our more specialised 
modern forms), and their world-wide distribution, is clearly brought 
out, while at the same time the great complexity of their organiza¬ 
tion plainly indicates the existence of numberless earlier floras 
representing the simpler stages in the evolution of these highly 
developed vascular plants, floras of which we have as yet unearthed 
