﻿PREFATORY NOTE. 



The investigations here recorded were begun in the field in 1898. During 

 the summer of that year, while collecting Testudinata in the "Bad Lands" of the 

 Cheyenne River and Dinosauria in the nearby Rim of the Eastern Black Hills, I 

 had many opportunities for visiting and carefully examining the famous Black 

 Hawk cycad locality, to which my attention had been previously directed by 

 Professor Marsh, when the season's work was planned. It was, too, during the 

 fall of 1898 that, as is more fully related in the fourth chapter, I had the good 

 fortune to discover, well to the north of the old Black Hawk locality and to the 

 east of Piedmont, the fossil cycad bearing the most perfectly silicified prefoliate 

 fronds of any yet obtained. Soon after this discovery, furthermore, Professor 

 Lester F. Ward, whom I then met for the first time, revisited the Piedmont-Black 

 Hawk region. Thus I found myself in touch with the two men of all others in 

 this country most interested in the fossil cycads — the one primarily in securing a 

 great and representative collection, the other in making these peculiarly interesting 

 and problematic forms accessible to the further study so urgently required ; and I 

 returned to New Haven with the fixed intention of attempting a complete elabora- 

 tion of the structure of the Mesozoic cycads as soon as might prove feasible. The 

 necessity for the proposed series of thin sections was fully appreciated by Professor 

 Marsh, and it was particularly pleasing to me that he was able to take part in the 

 discovery of the staminate disk and foliage which was made shortly thereafter. 



The subsequent course of these studies is of lesser moment in this connection. 

 As I have made all of the sections and most of the photographs and photomicro- 

 graphs, it is evident that the labor involved has been arduous, however replete 

 with interest. With respect to the mode of presentation of relationships in the 

 two closing chapters, it may be said that the form adopted appeared the most prac- 

 tical in the present status of laboratory study of the existing cycads, and field and 

 laboratory study of the fossil cycads. I am keenly aware that the conclusions 

 reached therein can be at the best but tentative ones, and that, above all, the pale- 

 ontologic record must be laboriously scanned afield for man)' years before mere 

 hypothesis can be thrust aside for the clear and established truth. But it can not 

 be doubted that it is fully possible to accomplish a final and satisfactory solution of 

 the still largely obscure and hidden phases of homoplasy and parallelism involved 

 in the origin of cycadaceous plants, the fuller knowledge of which is so centrally 

 fundamental to an empiric conception of gymnosperm and perhaps even angio- 

 sperin evolution. 



In taking up the study of the cycads at the point of relative urgency, and 

 following the initial macroscopic descriptions by Ward, it has not been thought 

 either necessary, or in any sense a convenient method, to attempt to deal, in this 

 volume, with any of the minor questions of classification and nomenclature. Time 



