On the Flora of the Devonian Period in North-eastern America

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

The existence of several species of land-plants in the Devonian rocks of New York and Pennsylvania was ascertained many years ago by the Geological Surveys of those States, and several of those plants have been described and figured in their Reports *. In Canada Sir W. E. Logan had ascertained, as early as 1843, the presence of an abundant, though apparently monotonous and simple, flora in the Devonian strata of Gasp6; but it was not until 1859 that these plants were described by the author in the ' Proceedings' of this Society*. More recently Messrs. Matthew and Hartt, two young geologists of St. John, New Brunswick, have found a rich and interesting flora in the semi-metamorphic beds in the vicinity of that city, in which a few fossil plants had previously been observed by Dr. Gesner, Dr. Robb, and Mr. Bennett of St. John; but they had not been figured or described. These plants, however, I described in the ‘Canadian Naturalist‚ †, together with some additional species, of the same age, found at Perry, in the State of ~aine, and preserved in the collection of the Natural History Society of Portland. The whole of the plants thus described I summed up in the paper last mentioned as consisting of 21 species, belonging to 16 genera, exclusive of genera like Sternbergia and Lepidostrobu,% which represent parts of plants only. In the past summer I visited St. John; and, in company with Messrs. Matthew and Hartt, explored the localities of the plants