Note on the Relations of the Supposed Carboniferous Plants of Bear Island with the Palæozoic Flora of North America

I have only recently received the May number of the ‘Geological Journal’, containing the interesting paper of Dr. Heer on the plants above mentioned, and beg to request permission to address to the Society a few remarks on their supposed equivalency with the American Devonian Flora. The plants catalogued by Dr. Heer, and characterizing what he calls the “Ursa Stage,” are in part representatives of those of the American flora which I have described as the “Lower Carboniferous Coal-measures” (Subcarboniferous of Dana), and whose characteristic species, as developed in Nova Scotia, I noticed in the Journal of the Geological Society in 1858 (vol. xv.). Dr. Heer's list, however, includes some Upper Devonian forms; and I would suggest that either the plants of two distinct beds, one Lower Carboniferous and the other Upper Devonian, have been near to or in contact with each other and have been intermixed, or else that in this high northern latitude, in which (for reasons stated in my Report on the Devonian Flora) I believe the Devonian plants to have originated, there was an actual intermixture of the two floras. In America, at the base of the Carboniferous of Ohio, a transition of this kind seems to occur; but elsewhere in North-Eastern America the Lower Carboniferous beds are usually unmixed with the Devonian. Dr. Heer, however, proceeds to identify these plants with those of the American Chemung, and even with those of the Middle Devonian of New Brunswick, as described by me—a conclusion from which I