Abstract
AMONG the many memoirs included in the Fifth Annual Report of the U.S. Geological Survey, just distributed, none evinces more laborious research than the sketch of palæobotany, and no part of this will prove more valuable, both from its exhaustive treatment and its wealth of references, than the section with the above title. The matter divides itself naturally into a history of the scientific, and of the pre-scientific period. To the latter of course belong the speculations of the early Greek philosophers, whose ideas were far more correct than those held fifteen or sixteen centuries later, for they at least recognised that petrifactions had once been living things, and that the mountains in which sea-shells were embedded had once been under the sea. These doctrines were it appears the popular belief of the Romins, and continued to be held until the spread of Christianity caused them to be rejected, and that long period of stagnation to set in, when all natural science was weighed down and subordinated to the religious cosmogony.
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Sketch of the Early History and Subsequent Progress of Palæobotany 1 . Nature 34, 598–599 (1886). https://doi.org/10.1038/034598a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/034598a0