130 Transactions of the Society. 



We all remember the general character of the Carboniferou& 

 forests, from which our conceptions of Palaeozoic plant-life are 

 chiefly drawn — their gigantic Lycopods and scarcely less gigantic 

 Horsetails, together with the vast assemblage of plants with the 

 habit of Ferns, the majority of which, however, as recent research 

 has shown, were in reality seed-bearing forms, though not without 

 Fern-affinities.* There were, in addition, trees of a far higher type 

 of organisation, recalling, in their habit and the structure of their 

 stems, some of the Conifera^ of the Southern Hemisphere, though 

 sufficiently distinct in other characters to constitute an order of 

 their own — the Cordaitete. Both they and the Fern-like Pterido- 

 sperms were Seed-plants, Spermophytes. We have abundant evi- 

 dence of the existence of Seed-plants in very early days, in fact, 

 practically as far back in the Palaeozoic as our records of terres- 

 trial plants extend. To-night, however, I am going to speak of 

 Flowering Plants, by which I do not mean the same thing as Seed- 

 plants, though the two terms have often been used as synonymous. 

 One of the results of the discoveries in Palfeozoic Botany already 

 mentioned has been to show that the seed-bearing and flower-bearing 

 characters by no means coincide, for the fern-like Seed-plants of 

 Palaeozoic age were in no sense of the words Flowering Plants. 

 The evidence shows that their seeds, like the fructification of 

 ordinary Ferns, were borne on leaves differing but little from the 

 vegetative fronds and not aggregated on any special axis as are the 

 parts of a flower. The nearest and, indeed, the only analogy to be 

 found among recent seed-plants, is in the female plant of Cycas, to 

 which we shall return presently. The Mesozoic plants, however, 

 with which we are concerned to-night were not only Seed- plants, 

 but they bore their reproductive organs in a form which everyone 

 would naturally describe as a flower. They were Flowering Plants 

 in the full sense of the term, however different in other respects 

 from the Flowering Plants of the present day. 



The Mesozoic floras from the Upper Trias to the Lower 

 Cretaceous maintain, on the whole, a very uniform character, 

 widely different from that of the preceding Palaeozoic vegetation. 

 The Lycopodiaceous trees have disappeared ; the gigantic Horse- 

 tails have given place to forms more like the Equiseta of our own 

 day ; the fern-like Seed-plants are no longer conspicuous, and the 

 Cordaiteffi are gone. True Ferns, on the other hand, are abundant, 

 more so, no doubt, than in the earlier period ; true Conifers, often 

 much resembling recent genera, are now a dominant group ; the 

 family now represented by the Maidenhair tree {Ginkgo) is preva- 

 lent, but the most striking feature of the vegetation is the 

 abundance, in all parts of the World, of plants belonging to the 

 class of the Cycads, now so limited a group. 



* See President's Address for 1905, " What were the Carboniferous Perns ?"" 

 this Journal, April 1905. 



