As a student I was greatly impressed, as were many others, by the exploration achievements of paleontology, of which there were many distinguished exponents at the time. On entering the subject in 1947 it seemed logical to try to bring the obvious abundance and increasing availability of microfossils to bear on the exploitation problem of obtaining better correlation results in stratigraphy and in other applications. Light microscopy was then approaching peak performance and, among microfossils, plant remains such as cuticles, megaspores and palynomorphs were rapidly becoming available in great quantity. It appeared that the very large number of characters of fossils which could be discriminated and which could usually also be measured should be convertible into new stratigraphic correlation potential. The methods of taxonomy of fossils and of stratigraphic description and comparison had been in satisfactory use with all the well-known megafossils for many decades. It appeared that the degree of further success should depend on the work input and on skill in selecting new groups for attention.

The outcome of much honest effort to this end was surprisingly disappointing both from my own data and from that published by colleagues and contemporaries. Progress towards sharper discrimination appeared to be only slight. General discussion of such problems in the late 1950s and early 1960s was tinged with pessimism; ‘evolution was too slow’, ‘fossils could not lead to any appreciably better stratigraphic resolution than that already achieved’, ‘other methods might well be better’.