Professor Nathorst writes to me as follows: “In spite of their very fragmentary condition the vegetable fossils brought home by you are of great interest, as they give us our first insight into the plant-world in regions north of the eightieth degree of latitude during the latter part of the Jurassic period. The most common are leaves of a fir-tree (Pinus) which resembles the Pinus Nordenskiöldi (Heer) found in the Jurassic strata of Spitzbergen, East Siberia, and Japan, but which probably belongs to a different species. There occur also narrower leaves of another species, and furthermore male flowers and fragments of a pine cone[15] with several seeds (Figs. 1–3), one of which (Fig. 1) suggests the Pinus Maakiana (Heer) from the Jurassic strata of Siberia. Among traces of other pine-trees may be mentioned those of a broad-leaved Taxites, resembling Taxites gramineus (Heer), specially found in the Jurassic strata of Spitzbergen and Siberia, which has leaves of about the same size as those of the Cephalotaxus Fortunei, at present existing in China and Japan. It is interesting, too, to find remains of the genus Feildenia (Figs. 4 and 5), which has as yet been found only in the polar regions. It was first discovered by Nordenskiöld in the Tertiary strata near Cape Staratschin, on Spitzbergen, in 1868, and was described by Heer under the name of Torellia. It was subsequently found by Feilden in the Tertiary strata at Discovery Bay, in Grinnell Land, during the English Polar Expedition of 1875–76; and Heer now changed the generic name to Feildenia, as Torellia had already been employed as the name of a mussel. This species has since been found by me in 1882 in the Upper Jurassic strata of Spitzbergen. The leaves remind one of the leaves of the subspecies nageia of the existing genus Podocarpus.
Plant Fossils
“The finest specimens of the whole collection are the leaves of a small Gingko, of which one is complete (Fig. 6). This genus, with plum-like seeds and with leaves which, unlike those of other pine-trees, have a real leaf-blade, is found at present, in one single species only, in Japan, but existed in former times in numerous forms and in many regions. During the Jurassic period it flourished especially in East Siberia, and has also been found on Spitzbergen, in East Greenland (at Scoresby Sound), and at many places in Europe, etc. During the Cretaceous and the Tertiary periods it was still found on the west coast of Greenland at 70° north latitude. The leaf here reproduced belongs to a new species, which might be called Gingko polaris, and which is most closely related to the G. flabellata (Heer) from the Jurassic strata of Siberia. It bears a certain habitual resemblance to Gingko digitata (Lindley and Hutton), particularly as found in the brown Jurassic strata of England and Spitzbergen; but its leaves are considerably smaller. Besides this species, one or two others may also occur in this collection, as well as fragments of the leaves of the genus Czekanowskia, related to the Gingko family, but with narrow leaf-blades resembling pine-needles.
“Ferns are very scantily represented. Such fragments as there are belong to four different types; but the species can scarcely be determined. One fragment belongs to the genus Cladophlebis, common in Jurassic strata; another suggests the Thyrsopteris, found in the Jurassic strata of East Siberia and of England; a third suggests the Onychiopsis characteristic of the Upper Jurassic strata. The fourth, again, seems to be closely related to the Asplenium (Petruschinense), which Heer has described, found in the Siberian Jurassic strata. The specimen is remarkable from the fact that the epidermis cells of the leaf have left a clear impression on the rock.
“With its wealth of pine leaves, its poverty of ferns, and its lack of Cycadaceæ, this Franz Josef Land flora has somewhat the same character as that of the Upper Jurassic flora of Spitzbergen, although the species are somewhat different. Like the Spitzbergen flora, it does not indicate a particularly genial climate, although doubtless enormously more so than that of the present day. The deposits must doubtless have occurred in the neighborhood of a pine forest. So far as the specimens enable one to judge, the flora seems to belong rather to the Upper (White) Jurassic system than to the Middle (Brown) system.”
It was undeniably a sudden transition to come straight from our long inert life in our winter lair, where one’s scientific interests found little enough stimulus, right into the midst of this scientific oasis, where there was plenty of opportunity for work, where books and all necessary apparatus were at hand, and where one could employ one’s leisure moments in discussing with men of similar tastes all sorts of scientific questions connected with the Arctic zone. In the botanist of the expedition, Mr. Harry Fisher, I found a man full of the warmest interest in the fauna and flora of the polar regions, and the exhaustive investigations which his residence here has enabled him to make into the plant-life and animal-life (especially the former) of the locality, both by sea and land, will certainly augment in a most valuable degree our knowledge of its biological conditions. I shall not easily forget the many pleasant talks in which he communicated to me his discoveries and observations. They were all eagerly absorbed by a mind long deprived of such sustenance. I felt like a piece of parched soil drinking in rain after a drouth of a whole year.
