History of Palaeobotany

By Morrell, Jack

A.J. BOWDEN, C.V. BUREK and R. WILDING (eds.), History of Palaeobotany: Selected Essays. Geological Society Special Publication 241. London: The Geological Society, 2005. Pp. 304. ISBN 1-86239-174-2. Pounds 80.00 (hardback). doi:10.1017/ S0007087407000167

In my local park there is displayed in the open a large fossil tree stump with roots. This specimen of Stigmaria ficoides was one of several excavated and removed in the 1880s from a quarry in the coal measures at Clayton near Bradford. The most famous one, discovered in 1886, was bought by W. C. Williamson and transported to the new Museum of Owens College, Manchester. It was crucial in ending the renowned dispute between Williamson and Adolphe Brongniart, and his supporters, about classification in palaeobotany. In the 1820s Brongniart had divided the history of plant life into four distinct periods. The first included that of the coal measures and was allegedly characterized by cryptogamic plants such as ferns, which have no flowers. In the second and third periods gymnospermous plants, conifers and cycads, which have naked seeds, first appeared. Faced with a coal measures specimen of Sigillarla, a stem which had a central pith surrounded by a secondary growth of wood, Brongniart claimed it was not a cryptogam because living forms lacked this secondary growth, which was formed from a viscid substance known as cambium. Brongniart had available only compression fossils, which were often fragmentary and rarely showed the reproductive structures on which botanical classification was based. In contrast, from the 1850s Williamson examined with a microscope thin sections of fossilized plants, especially coalballs from the Lancashire coal measures, which contained fragments of stems, leaves and seeds, in such anatomical detail that the internal structure of the plants could be studied. From the 1840s he suspected that Stigmaria was not a floating aquatic plant but the root of Sigillarla. Using these resources, Williamson’s Stigmaria monograph (1887) finally established that the trees of the coal measures were cryptogams, which possessed layers of cambium and were more like ferns than conifers.

It is sad that this long-running episode is not fully discussed in the volume under review, which contains eighteen essays. Contrary to what the editors claim in a perfunctory introduction, the contributors do not always focus on people and topics ignored in the secondary literature; five of them reveal little new about some well- known figures. The other contributions range from the useful to the interesting. The significant involvement of women in the last century is explored via Marie Stopes, of Married Love fame, and Emily Dix. Hugh Torrens discusses the first use of binomial nomenclature in the 1810s. Alan Howell reveals that commercial paleobotany flourished in the early twentieth century through the Lomax Company of Bolton. J. E. A. Marshall claims convincingly that Arthur Raistrick, Bradford-born Dalesman of the Millenium, Quaker and historian, was Britain’s premier palynologist – in the 1930s he solved the difficult problem of correlating coal seams by using fossilized microspores. Three knowledgeable essays about palaeobotanical research schools in the universities of Manchester, Glasgow and Sheffield stress the centrality of charismatic leaders, such as Williamson, F. O. Bower and L. R. Moore, and the importance of institutional location, whether in botany or geology departments. Five contributions disturb the predominantly British focus. Christopher Cleal et al. confirm the importance of illustrators and illustrations in the classic publications of Ernst von Schlotheim, Kaspar von Sternberg and Brongniart. Barry Thomas reveals the salience of fossil forests in geological conservation in the USA, Canada and Britain. Three short pieces deal with the Italian Achille de Zigno and the shaping of paleobotany in nineteenth-century Argentina and twentieth-century China.

Palaeobotany is too easily dismissed as the Cinderella of palaeontology: sometimes palaeontology, the study of ancient life, is even used as a synonym for palaeozoology ; and the discoveries made in palaeobotany have not seemed as spectacular as those concerning invertebrate and especially vertebrate fossils. This volume, a product of the History of Geology Group of the Geological Society of London, is not always historiographically sophisticated, but it is a welcome though expensive supplement to H. N. Andrews’s Fossil Hunters (Ithaca, NY, 1980), still the standard treatment of the history of palaeobotany.

JACK MORRELL

Bradford, West Yorkshire

Copyright Cambridge University Press Sep 2007

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