Fossil Plants

Hastings Standard, Volume X, Issue 5242, 6 July 1906, Page 3

Fossil Plants

I Per Press Association)

Auckland, July .*> Professor A. P. W. Thomas, of Auckland University College, has made a bontauical discovery which is attracting considerable attention on the part |of scientific men in Europe and America, and has formed the subject of a paper recently read before the Royal Society. There ar? two New Zealand plants long known to botanists as Tmesipteris and Psilotum ariquent- ■ rum. which Professor Thomas has (now found are survivals of the fossil plants of the coal measures of England, , Belgium and North America, in fact, I the whole of the Northern Hemisphere. ; These coal measure plants were thought I to have no living representatives in , exist'nee. and this impression preI vailed up tn the completion of Proies- * sor Thomas' researches. The interest lof Professor Thomas' discovery lies in establishing the relationship of | the plants with those which have J been thought hitherto to have be- ! come extinct as living plants, their J remains, so to speak, being interred Jin coal. Professor Thomas' notes on • the subject have been received with J something like excitement by the I botanists at Kew, and Dr. Scott, an j eminent paltantolngi. t at those garden.-, has deferred publication of a v,'»rk on plant: which was <«in" throie-h the pre .-• in e>rde r that he may include a picture of the plant- above- referred u> and also Professor Tli-.ima-' notes thereon.