XVm PEOCEEDINGS OF THE 



no flower-buds at his command ; and it was only some years later 

 that he succeeded in procuring from Mr. Monteiro more satisfactory 

 specimens, in various stages of development. The various works he 

 was then engaged in prevented his resuming the subject himself; 

 but he transmitted a series of these specimens to Professor de Bary ; 

 and it was from these materials that Strasburger was enabled to 

 trace the progress of the flowers from the earliest stage. After an 

 evidently most careful examination, he has given the results, pp. 91 

 and 141 of his 'Coniferen und Gnetaceen.' The accuracy of his 

 observations has been confirmed by Professor M'Nab, to whom Dr. 

 Hooker had also communicated some of Monteiro's specimens, and 

 who, after an equally careful independent examination, embodied 

 the results in a paper read at our meeting of the 19th December last 

 and now in the printer's hands, to which he afterwards added a note 

 on the receipt of Strasburger's essay. 



The chief interest attached to this extraordinary plant lies in the 

 probabiUty of its being the nearest approach to (the least modified 

 amongst the descendants of) the original type or parent stock of 

 Dicotyledons which has reached recent geological periods. If, as 

 above, we suppose the original parent race of Dicotyledons to have 

 been one in. which phyUotaxy had already become variously modified 

 for the purposes of nutrition, but in which the sexual arrangements 

 remained much in arrear, we may conjecture that amongst its 

 immediate descendants there was a tendency to vary both in the 

 relative arrangement of the sexual elements and in the development 

 of floral appendages amongst and around them, combinations arising 

 in both directions calculated to promote the welfare of the race. In 

 the midst of the varied circumstances in which their descendants 

 were placed in the course of their dispersion through successive 

 ages, some profited by an increasing complexity in their floral deve- 

 lopments counteracting the evils of sexual contiguity, others by a 

 total separation of the sexual elements rendering their comparative 

 exposure rather beneficial than prejudicial. From the former may 

 have descended the higher Dicotyledons, from the latter the Conifers — 

 the former ever increasing in the complexity of their arrangements, 

 so long as they retained their hermaphroditism, simplifying them 

 again, perhaps, in some cases by arrest or obliteration as they be- 

 came more or less unisexual, the latter retaining rather more of 

 their primitive simplicity. Wehuitschia does not absolutely belong to 

 either, and may be a race which has come down to us with less of 

 alteration from the early descendants of the common stock than 



