Review

For more than thirty years the well-known Swedish palynologist Dr G. Erdtman has consistently gathered facts about pollen types. Pollen-analysis led him, naturally, and necessarily, to pollen morphology, so as to lay a safe basis for further palaeobotanical work. It will be a surprise to many a reader of the above book that the term, “palynology”, already very familiar among botanists, was only coined in 1944. This term, mostly but apparently erroneously applied in a palaeobotanical sense only, just means “pollen science” and is therefore more or less synonymous to pollen (external) morphology 8.1.