IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 63 



narrowed base. The ovule is orthotropous and sessile; the seeds large, ovoid or 

 oblongr and usually fleshy and red outside but with a tough inner coat; the endos- 

 perm is thick, rather abundant; the cotyledons grown together, unless at the base; 

 the plumule squamose emerging through a cleft in the cotyledons." 



•'Cycads are perennial plants abounding in gum, growing at the apex only, and 

 as if corticated by the persistent bases of leaves and prophylla; the vascular system 

 made up of rings of bast and wood, surrounding a well developed medulla or pith, 

 which is rich in starch. Demarcation of annual rings does not appear and some- 

 times there are woody strands in the pith; the roots are fibrous and make up cor- 

 alliform masses which are often partly above ground and sometimes by buds 

 reproduce the plant." 



Of existing Cycads there have been recognized some seventy species, of which 

 the greater number occur in the tropics around the world. Some, however, are 

 found in the temperate regions of South Africa and many in Australia and the 

 adjacent islands. In Florida there is one species, as has been said, and one has 

 been reported from Japan. 



Our species Zamia iiitegrifoUa "Coontie" is a remarkable plant, having for 

 stem a sort of subterranean bulb which has, however, a scarred cortex, a woody, 

 cylinder and an abundant pith; large coriacious pinnately divided leaves which 

 appear one after the other in a sort of a whorl, thus including leaves of different 

 size, and for fruit shows cones of two kinds, staminate and pistillate, much alike 

 although the latter is larger. Each cone is made of scales which are thickened, 

 finally peltate, outwardly and bear at base the pollen-sacs or ovules as the case may 

 be. The cones are not quite apical and they appear to spring from the axils of the 

 leaves although this is not yet clearly made out and leaves and foliar organs are 

 strangely mixed. In Cycas the cone is apical and subsequent growth starts up at 

 one side of the cone's pedicel. 



All this has been said of living or existing Cycads in order to make clear what 

 may be said in reference to our North American fossil species. Saporta has 

 pointed out very clearly that the ancient European Cycads (for there were once 

 such plants in Europe although none there now) of which we have the trunks, do 

 not difiFer from our modern forms much more than these now widely separated 

 species differ from each other. "Fossil species are as a rule," he says, "far 

 smaller than existing forms." A curious fact which leads to many surmises. For 

 it must be said that the group under discussion as at present defined is but a rem- 

 nant of a flora that from the Trias, probably, on down and through the Cretaceous 

 shared with loftier plants all the forest regions of the earth, as these forests shifted 

 through the ages from shore to shore, from zone to zone. Here in North America 

 where now but a single species exists, persists, these remarkable organisms spread 

 at one time from the Dakotas to Greenland, probably covering all that was then 

 United States from Colorado to Maryland. As long ago as 1874 Lesquereux 

 described from a single leaf fragment a species of Cycad which he named Podo- 

 znmiies haydenii from the Dakota sandstones of Nebraska. A few years earlier 

 Heer in his Flora Artica described fossils representing at least four genera of 

 Cycadaceous plants from the Atane Schists of Greenland. It speaks volumes for 

 the wonderful botanical instinct of these men, that their conclusions, founded 

 upon the study of mere leaf impressions and these often fragmentary were never- 

 theless accurate. These conclusions have since been wonderfully confirmed by the 

 discovery of undeniable Cycad fossils in the regions and from the very formations 

 and strata from which some of the leaf fragments came. While the ordinary 



