A study of a collection of fossil plants from the Lower Bagshot pipe-clay of Poole District Dorset. With a critical examination of the value of the epidermis in the determination of angiospermous plants

Abstract

In a study of the records of J.S. Gardner and others, it is evident that the Hampshire Basin has yielded a quantity and variety of plants of Lower Bagshot age. The fossil flora, named from leaf-form and venation only, is generally described as indicating a sub-tropical climate, and is compared (by Gardner) with plants now living in parts of sub-tropical Australia. A few localities, such as Studland and Corfe Castle, in the Dorset part of the Hampshire Basin, are recorded as having an especially luxuriant flora, and it was in order to apply modern technique to some of these plant remains that the research was commenced. The first part of this paper, therefore, gives an account of the collecting of fossil material from the area around these two centres and of the extension of collecting to all the Pipe-Clay region in the immediate neighbourhood of Poole Harbour. The method, commonly in use at the present day for the naming of plants of Tertiary age, consisting in combining the external plant characters of form and venation with the microscopic epidermal characters, is tried and found to give no satisfactory results. The criticism of this method forms the subject matter of the second part of the paper.