Address delivered at the anniversary meeting of the Geological Society of London, on the 19st of February, 1841 : and the announcement of the award of the Wollaston medal and donation fund for the same year / by the Rev. Professor Buckland.

  • Buckland, William, 1784-1856.
Date:
1841
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Address delivered at the anniversary meeting of the Geological Society of London, on the 19st of February, 1841 : and the announcement of the award of the Wollaston medal and donation fund for the same year / by the Rev. Professor Buckland. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    world by his own extensive researches in Botany and Vegetable Physiology. Geological Botany, if it may not be said to have originated, has made its greatest advances in the present century ; it had indeed attracted the attention of L’luyd Scheuchzer and Knorr, in times when the methods of botanical investigation had not assumed that physiological character which now enables us to establish the minute analogies between living and fossil species; but in 1804 we witnessed, in a publication by Baron Schlottheim, the first at- tempt to systematize, by comparison with existing families of plants, the obscure and curious fossil vegetable remains that characterize the strata of the Coal formation. In 1820 Count Sternberg published his more enlarged illustrations of the same subject, founded on the fossil plants of the coal-field of Bohemia. Not long after this, I, for the first time, heard from the lips of M. Adolphe Brongniart, then a youth visiting Oxford, a summary of those enlarged and enlight- ened views respecting Geological Botany, which, in 1828, he set forth in his celebrated “ Prodromus of the History of Fossil Vege- tables,” being the Introduction to his great work, which still con- tinues to be the register of his progressive discoveries, illustrating by figures and descriptive comparisons the analogies between living families of the Vegetable Kingdom and the remains of extinct plants, which clothed the surface of a former world. M. Adolphe Brongniart had, even then, arrived at a series of grand and philo- sophic generalizations as to a four-fold change in the character of fossil plants, concurrent with analogous changes in the fossil re- mains of extinct animals. He had ascertained that the Flora of the Coal formation was different from that of the New Red Sandstone series, and this again distinct from the Flora of the Oolite formation, whilst the plants in the Tertiary strata differ from the three preceding series, and approximate most nearly to existing vegetables. The dominant types, in the first of these series, he showed to be Ferns, and gigantic Equisetacese, and Lycopodiaceae, indicating a climate intensely hot and humid. In the second, he had found the pre- vailing types to be Ferns, Calamites, Coniferae, and Fucoids, in- dicating a less extreme condition of climate than the first. In the third, he had ascertained that Cycadeae, Coniferas, and Zosterites predominate, and evidence a climate not very different from that