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the spore-producing lycopods and the seed-producing gymunosperny 
had a common ancestry. What that ancestry was, I must really 
ask you to find out, just, however, giving myself the gratification 
of throwing one difficulty in your way, and it is this—rocks as old 
as the Carboniferous tell us of gymnosperms as highly organised as 
those we see growing to-day. The evolutionist, however, seeks. 
other aid than that of geology. He goes minutely into the 
structure of the pollen grains and the ovules, and notes the 
peculiarity of the embryo, and the mode of fertilization and 
germination, finding a good deal of suggestion as to the affinity 
of conifers with the vascular cryptograms, especially selaginellas. 
Modern text books insist upon this affinity—one of them in these 
words: Gymnosperms are quite as closely allied to the higher 
Cryptograms as the divisions of the latter are to each other. 
How easy it is to see that in any special branch of study one 
man builds on another man’s foundation. Robert Brown, that 
prince of botanists, in the early part of this century, was the first 
to enquire closely into those structural peculiarities that have- 
since been more fully studied, and have led botanists to those. 
conclusions that are now generally accepted. 
I wil! now briefly take you through the leading characters of the. 
order of the cone-bearers, and then pass on to informatien of a 
more general kind. 
Conifere.—A family of trees or shrubs comprising about 30 
genera, and about 800 species, of exogenous habit, and usually 
resinous, and with few exceptions, evergreen. Wood with indistinct. 
medullary rays and no true vascular tissue. Cells of the wood dise-. 
bearing, that is to say, furnished with circular markings, which. 
are not found in other kinds of wood (these discs are easily seen 
under the microscope). Leaves usually linear, like those of 
grasses, or needle-shaped, or small and scale-like. In Pinus, much 
the largest genus, the needle-shaped leaves are either in pairs, as. 
in the Scotch pine, or in clusters of three or five. In the larch,. 
one of the most valuable of conifers, the leaves are in clusters and 
deciduous. In arbor-vites and others, the leaves are very small, 
and overlap like green scales. Flowers of two kinds, usually on 
the same trees. The stamen-bearing ones arranged in catkins, 
very simple in structure (as in willows). Calyx and corolla none.. 
Pistillate flowers, if they may be called such, without perianth and. 
style, consisting of a sing/e naked ovule, or of a number of ovules... 
‘Fruit, a more ot less woody cone, a berry-like modification of the- 
cone (called a galbulus), or a solitary naked seed, seated in a sort. 
‘of cup. Seeds often winged. The relationship of a pine cone to 
juniper berry and the fruit of the yew is not, at first, clear, but. 
it is very real. Look at the so-called berry of the yew. There is: 
