404 
SECOND REPORT- 1832 . 
in a mineral state, is a branch of our science which may almost 
be said to have been created within the last ten years. Schlot- 
heim and Count Sternberg were among the first to enter on 
the field, and opened it very ably; but still we must always 
look to Adolphe Brongniart as the great introducer of complete 
and general views into the department of Fossil Botany. Every 
one interested in the subject must be familiar with his exact 
assignment to the great formations of the successive geological 
aeras, of different classes of vegetables peculiar to each, and his 
inferences as to the higher temperature of the surface of our 
planets at these earlier periods, in some of which every analogy 
points out an insular tropical climate as alone capable of having 
nourished the vegetable forms detected. 
In one instance, however, it appears that we are now probably 
authorized to make an important addition to his statements; for 
while he had detected only vascular Cryptogamiae and a few Mo- 
nocotyledoneae, as Palms and arborescent Liliaceae, in our carbo¬ 
niferous rocks, Mr.Witham appears fully to have established 
the occurrence of Coniferas * also, by obtaining such thin and 
transparent slices of the fossils as allow a microscopical inves¬ 
tigation of the structure of the sections thus procured, as per¬ 
fectly as if they were those of recent vegetables: these Coni- 
ferae appear to have been species of gigantic growth, and per¬ 
fectly distinct from those now existing; they are found to pre¬ 
vail in the Scotch coal-fields, while that of Newcastle presents 
a great predominance of vascular Cryptogamiae. Mr. W. has 
boldly conjectured that the former may perhaps have been 
derived from the drift timber of forests once growing on the 
Grampian chain already an elevated island; while the latter 
may possibly have formed the vegetation of more swampy low¬ 
lands, and grown nearly in the present site. 
Messrs. Lindley and Hutton are now publishing a Work, in 
numbers, on the fossil vegetables of our own island. 
Many general treatises on geology, of which the leading ob¬ 
ject must necessarily be the systematic arrangement or classi¬ 
fication, and comparative views of the several formations, have 
appeared since those of Daubuisson and Humboldt, the merits 
of which, however, have not yet been surpassed ; but among 
the best of the more recent publications we may mention 
Keferstein’s Tabellen , Brongniart’s Terrains, and D’Halloy’s 
* Mr. W. has indeed as yet published only transverse sections of the alleged 
Coniferae, while our best botanists are of opinion that transverse sections alone 
cannot afford certain characters of this class; yet assuredly the sections he has 
already given appear decidedly remote from the monocotyledonous and closely 
approximate to the coniferous structure. 
