Species of Oycadeoidea, from Maryland. 5 



fructification, the clearer it becomes that all fossil cycadean vege 

 tation from beds below the Tertiary represented a group distinct 

 from the recent Cycadaceae. When the nature of the reproductive 

 apparatus was made known by Carruthers in the remarkable spec 

 imen which came from Luccomb Chine, on the Isle of Wight, he 

 proposed for it a new generic name Bennettites, and Count Solms- 

 Laubach established on the same data the family name Bennettitex. 

 But it soon became obvious that the restricting of this name to 

 this one form was simply based on our ignorance of the reproduct 

 ive apparatus of other trunks, and wherever further data as to 

 the latter have been brought forward they have strengthened the 

 presumption that most or all fossil forms possessed a similar re 

 productive apparatus. Count Solms has therefore, in his latest 

 important paper on the Bennettitese of the Italian museums, re 

 ferred them all to Buckland's genus Cycadeoidea. In this, too, 

 he incidentally includes many other European and some Ameri 

 can forms, while adhering to the one species of Bennettites, B. 

 Gibsonianus, in which the fruit is known, and as a result of an 

 examination of photographs of our American forms he has stated 

 in letters to me that certain of them are certainly to be referred 

 to Bennettites. But in such studies as I have been able to make 

 of these forms, whether from Maryland or from the Rocky 

 Mountain region, I am unable to see anything that can be called 

 a generic difference, and they all resemble the Italian forms 

 more closely than they do those from Portland. I therefore, in 

 the former paper, grouped them all as Cycadeoidea, and I have 

 not since seen any reason for departing from this view. Until 

 their internal structure is further studied I shall adhere to this 

 name, and in view of all that has been said I am disposed to 

 extend Robert Brown's group name to all the Mesozoic cycadean 

 vegetation, whether represented by trunks or by foliage, fruit, 

 or other organs, on the general assumption that however many 

 genera there may have been, if they could be correlated the 

 foliage, etc., would belong to the trunks found in the same 

 general beds. In a matter of which so little is known, all is at 

 best provisional, and a convenient and flexible nomenclature is 

 the chief result to be aimed at. 



The full classification of the Cycadacea? would therefore be to 

 use that term to represent the entire family, both living and fossil, 

 and to subdivide it into the two subfamilies, the Cycadean for the 

 living forms and the Cycadeoidese for the fossil forms. This is 

 the classification adopted below. 



