XII.—The Genus Pitys, Witham, emend

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Abstract
Few plants of Carboniferous age have appealed so strongly to the scientific observer as the huge woody trunks of a coniferous type that have been discovered from time to time in beds of that system. The appeal has come from different points of view at different times; thus these trees were hailed by Witham (1831, pp. 1–2), Lindley and Hutton (1831, p. xiii), and Hugh Miller (1849, p. 186) as evidence of the existence of higher coniferous plants in abundance during a period to which the current consensus of scientific opinion had assigned only members of the lower plant families, or would admit only an infrequent occurrence of higher forms. These remains were therefore important in discussions concerning the development of plant life, and were cited by Hugh Miller (1849, p. 185) in his attempt to combat the then embryonic ideas of evolution—the recrudescence of Lamarckian ideas—current under the name of “the development hypothesis.” Miller, however, recognised one significant point, namely, that they represented a land flora as distinct from one occupying a water habitat (1849, p. 202).

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