The collections of fossil plants, made by Nansen in Franz Josef Land through the courtesy of the Jackson-Harmsworth expedition, are of scientific value as indicating the fossil Jurassic flora of Franz Josef Land as compared with that of Spitzbergen. These collections fill in a not inconsiderable gap in the Arctic regions, and Nathorst’s investigations serve to confirm the opinions and statements made by Professor Heer, whose five volumes of Flora Fossilis Arctica constitute a monumental work. As is well known, research has established the fact that at one time Spitzbergen was covered with a luxuriant miocene vegetation--cypresses, birches, sequoiæ, oaks and planes. It moreover appears that this growth was coincident with the period when Spitzbergen, Greenland, Franz Josef Land and Nova Zembla experienced a continental climate. [Illustration: JURASSIC FOSSILS FOUND AT CAPE FLORA.] As fossil collections accumulate, one appreciates more and more the masterly manner in which Heer summed up the results of polar exploration as regards Arctic vegetable paleontology. He was the first to present to the world a clear idea of the vegetation of the Cretaceous land, scarcely known to science until elucidated by him. It developed that in Heer’s time, among the fossil plants found in Spitzbergen alone were 7 ginkos, 8 pines, a short bamboo, 7 poplars, 3 maples and a fossil strawberry. Dr. Nansen was fortunate in securing the co-operation of Prof. A. G. Nathorst in the examination of the fossil plants collected in Franz Josef Land, as he has devoted much time to the flora, present and past, of various portions of the Arctic regions, especially Spitzbergen and King Charles Land. Nathorst had the advantage of the notes of Newton, J. H. Steele and R. Curtis on the fossils of Franz Josef Land, published in the Quarterly Journal of Geological Science, London, vols. 53-54, 1897-1898. Most unfortunately, the fossils were very fragmentary, the leaves in themselves small and often indistinguishable in color from the rock, so that their examination was made almost entirely under the magnifying lens. While the organic substance of the plants was sometimes still to be seen in a soft, brownish variety of rock, yet the harder yellowish varieties offered only impressions, or cavities, their organic substance having entirely disappeared. In cross fractures there were sometimes cavities which were complete transverse sections of coniferous leaves. There were twenty-nine species, of which the entire number are coniferous except one fungus, one fern, two palms and one uncertain. Nathorst says: “The plant-bearing strata of Franz Josef Land, which are yet known to us, all belong, with the exception of those from Cook’s Rock and Cape Stephen, the age of which is still uncertain, to the upper Jurassic, or the transition beds to the cretaceous, while as yet no tertiary strata have been discovered.”