It is very much to be regretted that amongst our rising geologists we have none who are turning, as far as we know, their attention devotedly to fossil plants. There is a wide field open, and a most interesting one, for since the time of Lindley and Hutton, now six-and-twenty years ago, we have had no important British work on this branch of geology, and it cannot be supposed that the advance made by recent botanists in that interval would not be applicable, and of the highest advantage to the study of fossil vegetable remains. We have quite enough shell-pickers and mammoth-hunters for a few to devote their time and their energies to the ancient “flowers of the fields,” if flowers there were in those dreary days which some of our savants picture when they tell us how the carboniferous vegetation luxuriated in the warmest and densest of fogs, and the earth itself was a gigantic warming-pan for the plants that grew upon it.

The pretty fern-leaf we have figured came into our possession some years ago very accidentally, so much so that we are not quite sure of even its locality, and it is now deposited in the National Collection. Neither in Lindley and Hutton, the figures in which are not exquisite examples of art, nor amongst the actual specimens in the British Museum cabinets, could we find anything with which it seemed to accord.