As to the precursors of the Carboniferous flora, in default of information already acquired, I proceeded to question the Erian or Devonian rocks of Canada, in which Sir William Logan had already found remains of plants which had not, however, been studied or described. Laboriously coasting along the cliffs of Gaspé and the Baie des Chaleurs, digging into the sandstones of Eastern Maine, and studying the plants collected by the New York Survey, I began to find that there was a rich Devonian flora, and that, like that of the Carboniferous, it presented different stages from the base to the summit of the formation. But here a great advance was made in a somewhat unexpected way. My then young friends, the late Prof. Hartt and Mr. Matthew, of St. John, had found a few remains of plants in the Devonian, or at least pre-Carboniferous beds of St. John, which were placed in my hands for description. They were so novel and curious that inquiry was stimulated, and these gentlemen, with some friends of similar tastes, explored the shales exposed in the reefs near St. John, and when they found the more productive beds, broke them up by actual quarrying operations in such a way that they soon obtained the richest Devonian plant collections ever known. I think I may truly say that these young and enthusiastic explorers worked the St. John plant-beds in a manner previously unexampled in the world. Their researches were not only thus rewarded, but incidentally they discovered the first known Devonian insects, which could not have been found by a less painstaking process, and one of them discovered what I believe to be the oldest known land shell. Still more, their studies led to the separation from the Devonian beds of the Underlying Cambrian slates, previously confounded with them; and this, followed up by the able and earnest work of Mr. Matthew, has carried back our knowledge of the older rocks in Canada several stages, or as far as the earliest Cambrian previously known in Europe, but not before fully recognised in America, and has discovered in these old rocks the precursors of many forms of life not previously traced so far back.