The Presidents Address. By Dukinfield H. Scott. 141 



suggest those of a typical Angiosperra, carry us back by their 

 structure and form to the sporophylls of a Fern (see plate IX. 

 figs. 5 and 6), so that the characters of the flower as a whole may 

 almost be said to bridge the gulf between Cryptogams and the 

 higher Flowering Plants. The fern-like characters, however, 

 have probably come to the Bennettitete not directly from true 

 Ferns, but through the intermediate group of the Palaeozoic Pteri- 

 dosperms. The fact that the pollen-grains are borne in compound 

 pollen-sacs, or synangia, like those of the Marattiacese among 

 Ferns, is one of great significance. I should not be disposed, how- 

 ever, to lay quite so much stress on this indication of Marattiaceous 

 aSinities as Dr. Wieland has done. The presence of synangia is 

 probably to be explained by the relation of the Bennettitese to the 

 Pteridosperms, to which, as we now know, certain of the supposed 

 Marattiaceous fructifications of Palaeozoic age really belonged. 

 There can scarcely be a doubt that the Bennettitese trace their 

 ancestry through the Pteridosperms and not directly from Fili- 

 cinean forms, a conclusion in which Dr. Wieland appears to concur.* 

 The true Marat tiaceee of the Palaeozoic were probably a less extensive 

 family than has been supposed, and, on present evidence, were less 

 ancient than the Pteridosperms themselves, which we therefore 

 cannot derive from them, though the two groups may have had a 

 common origin. In spite, therefore, of the strikingly Marattiaceous 

 cliaracter of the pollen-bearing synangia in Bennettitese, I cannot 

 agree with Dr. Wieland in regarding the evidence for their descent 

 from Marattiaceous Ferns as conclusive, but, so far as that par- 

 ticular family of Ferns is concerned, should not assume anything 

 more than an indirect af&nity.f None the less, it is impossible to 

 emphasise too strongly the extraordinary combination of characters 

 which the Beunettitean flower presents, uniting in itself features 

 characteristic of the Angiosperms, the Gymnosperms, and the Ferns, 

 and suggesting that the passage from the Filicineee to the higher 

 Flowering Plants may have been (comparatively speaking) a short 

 cut. The complexity of this earliest known type of a true flower 

 indicates the probability, as Dr. Wieland points out,$ that the 

 evolution of the Angiospermous flower was a process of reduction. 

 There is thus no longer any presumption that the simplest forms 

 among the flowers of Angiosperms are likely to be the most primi- 

 tive. The tendency of the older morphologists to regard such 

 flowers as reductions from a more perfect type appears fully justi- 

 fled by the discovery of the elaboration of floral structure attained 

 by the Mesozoic Cycadophyta before the advent of the Angiosperms 

 themselves. 



* " American Fossil Cycads," p. 240. 



t Ttie general question of the relation of the early Seed-plants to Ferns is dis- 

 cussed in my article, " On the Present Position of Palaeozoic Botany," Progressus 

 Rei Botanicae, Heft 1, 1906. 



X " American Fossil Cycads," p. 143. 



