INTRODUCTION

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
About a century has passed since the first fossil plants of Cenozoic age were described from North America. At first there were few and scattered records and the earlier workers had no difficulty in keeping track of the plants already described from that field. A full quarter of a century elapsed before the need was felt for something in the nature of a catalogue of fossil plants. As the paleobotanical member of the U. S. Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories it fell to the lot of Lesquereux to produce the first of a series of catalogues in this field. This he published in 1878 under the title Catalogue of the Cretaceous and, Tertiary plants of North America with references to the descriptions. 1 While this earliest catalogue has set the general pattern for works of this nature, it differed in one major respect from later editions in that genera and species were arranged in botanical order rather than alphabetically. This was hardly a defect at the time for Lesquereux had only a total of 706 entries to record. These consisted of 157 species from the Cretaceous and 549 from the Tertiary record. Knowlton in the introductory statements of his two catalogues has credited S. A. Miller with the production of a catalogue somewhat similar to that of Lesquereux, 1878. This work 2 is, in my opinion, not a catalogue in any sense of the word insofar as fossil plants are concerned. In it, Miller, in chronologic order, lists short statements . . .

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: