Abstract With its long-standing coal industry working the measures of the Scottish central belt, fossil plants have long been known in Scotland. The earliest significant work dealing with Scottish palaeontology, David Ure’s The History of Rutherglen and East-Kilbride (David Niven, Glasgow) had been published in 1793, with its plates of Equisetum , ferns and bark impressions. But, as in Yorkshire and Lancashire, it was not until the industrial revolution’s increased exposure of fossils was matched by the advent of the ‘new European botany’ (which, in part, grew from substantial improvements in the optics for microscopy) that fossil plant study began in earnest in Scotland. In 1959 John Walton reflected on palaeobotany in Britain at the end of the 19th century, as ‘awakening from a long sleep’. In Glasgow, this awakening centred on the university’s Botany Department, and the development of the study of fossil plants closely parallels the growth of this department as a whole for much of its time. In the same city during this period a collective of artists called the ‘Glasgow Boys’ were pushing the boundaries of representational painting. With Frederick Bower’s own cohort of palaeobotanical ‘Glasgow Boys’ (David Gwynne-Vaughan and William Lang) facilitating the work of Robert Kidston, a veritable ‘School of Palaeobotany’ existed in the university at this time. John Walton himself was also destined to serve an unusual, but critical, later role in the preservation of Kidston’s work.

Abstract From ancient times through to the Renaissance reports of stones, fragments of iron and ‘six hundred other things’ fallen from the sky were written down in books. With few exceptions, these were taken as signals of heaven's wrath. The 18th century Enlightenment brought an entirely new approach in which savants sought rational explanations, based on the laws of physics, for unfamiliar phenomena. They accepted Isaac Newton's dictum of 1718 that outer space must be empty in order to perpetuate the laws of gravitation, and, at the same time, they rejected an old belief that stones can coalesce within the atmosphere. Logically, then, nothing could fall from the skies, except ejecta from volcanoes or objects picked up by hurricanes. They dismissed reports of fallen stones or irons as tales told by superstitious country folk, and ascribed stones with black crusts to bolts of lightning on pyritiferous rocks. The decade between 1794 and 1804 witnessed a dramatic advance from rejection to acceptance of meteorites. The three main contributing factors were E.F.F. Chladni's book of 1794, in which he argued for the actuality of falls and linked them with fireballs; the occurrence of four witnessed and widely publicized falls of stones between 1794 and 1798; and chemical and mineralogicai analyses of stones and irons, published in 1802 by Edward C. Howard and Jacques-Louis de Bournon. They showed that stones with identical textures and compositions, very different from those of common rocks, have fallen at different times in widely separated parts of the world. They also showed that erratic masses of metallic iron and small grains of iron in the stones both contain nickel, so they must share a common origin. Meanwhile, in 1789, Anton-Laurent de Lavoisier had revived the idea of the accretion of stones within the atmosphere, which became widely accepted. Its chief rival was a hypothesis that fallen stones were erupted by volcanoes on the Moon. During the first half of the 19th century falls of carbonaceous chondrites and achondrites, and observations on the metallography of irons, provided fresh insights on the range of compositions of meteorite parent bodies. By 1860 both of the two main hypotheses of origins were abandoned, and debates intensified on whether all meteorites were fragments of asteroids or some of them originated in interstellar space. This paper will trace some of the successes and some of the failures that marked the efforts to gain a better understanding of meteorite falls from the end of the 15th century to the early 20th century.

Abstract Arthur Smith Woodward commanded international respect and acclaim. He was honoured in scientific circles from Russia to the Americas and throughout Europe, particularly for his outstanding work on fossil fish. He was distinguished in both his exceptional abilities as a vertebrate palaeontologist and in his tall, authoritative presence. He appeared confident, contained and in control, while his intellectual gifts had been apparent from a very early age. He was a remarkable scientist, but a man whose reputation has for too long been seen through the prism of the Piltdown forgery.

ABSTRACT This contribution attempts to recount our collective progress in understanding the Archean–Hadean Earth system over the past 50 yr. Many realms of the geological sciences (geochemistry, petrology, geophysics, structural geology, geobiology, planetary science, and more) have made substantive contributions to this effort. These contributions have changed our understanding of the Archean–Hadean Earth in five major areas: (1) the expanse of Archean–Hadean time; (2) tectonics and lithospheric evolution, particularly possible analogs for the sites of modern, primary crust production and mantle differentiation (e.g., magmatic arcs, ocean ridges, and large igneous provinces); (3) evolution of the atmosphere-hydrosphere system, and its impact on the evolution of Earth’s endogenic and exogenic systems; (4) the history of liquid water, particularly at the ocean scale; and (5) the origin and development of the biosphere and its impact on the geologic record. We also emphasize that much of the progress made in understanding the evolution of early Earth systems over the past 50 yr has been fueled by important technological advances in analytical geochemistry, such as the advent of ion probes for U-Pb zircon geochronology, inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometry for trace-element and Hf isotopic analyses, Raman spectroscopy in organic geochemistry, and molecular reconstructions in biology. Within this context, we specifically review progress in our understanding of the Eoarchean history of southern West Greenland as an example of the value of continuous integration of careful geologic observation and mapping with evolving technology, which have combined to further open this window into Earth’s earliest systems.