PROCEEDINGS OF SOCIETIES. 85 



he had seen. He therefore handed in a paper containing a report of 

 his observations. 



The thanks of the meeting were given to Mr. Slack. 



Wm. Carruthers, Esq., F.R.S., then read a paper " On the Struc- 

 ture of the Stems of the Arborescent Lycopodiaceaa of the Coal- 

 measures." 



A vote of thanks was then accorded to Mr. Carruthers. 



Professor Thiselton Dyer (addressing the meeting as a visitor) 

 said he thought that the statements made by Mr. Carruthers would 

 commend themselves to the Society without any support from him. 

 In regard to one point, however, on which Mr. Carruthers had 

 touched, he might be permitted to say a few words. Mr. Carruthers 

 had the advantage of a wide acquaintance with recent plants ; this 

 was, however, far from being the case with all those who had written 

 on fossil plants. Indeed, speaking generally, it was unfortunate for 

 the advance of biology that two great a distinction was drawn between 

 what was extinct and what was recent, and he thought it would be a 

 very great advance if the divisions practically existing between 

 palaeontology and the study of recent organisms were entirely over- 

 thrown. He should like to see accomplished what had not yet 

 been done, namely, the arrangement in our museums of recent and 

 fossil specimens, whether of plants or animals, side by side, so that 

 they could be studied simultaneously. Moreover the division to 

 which he alluded did not exist merely in our museums, it was to be 

 found in the literature of science also. Hence it happened not unfre- 

 quently that we meet with vegetable palfeontologists still using terms 

 and expressions in their descriptions of structure which were alto- 

 gether obsolete in the eyes of botanists. For example. Prof. 

 Williamson, at the last meeting of the British Association, proposed 

 to approximate the classification of the vascular cryptogams to the 

 division of flowering plants into exogens and endogens. But this 

 division was now almost universally admitted to be untenable. In 

 his endeavour to correlate the extinct vascular cryptogams with 

 endogenous and exogenous flowering plants, Prof. "Williamson was 

 making use of distinctions which had no place in modern botany. 

 Our great English naturalist, John Ray, laid the foundations of a 

 natural classification of flowering plants by dividing them into 

 Dicotyledons and Monocotyledons. De CandoUe thought these two 

 groups might be characterized more conveniently by the mode of 

 growth of their stem ; he substituted, therefore, for Eay's names, 

 those of exogens and endogens. It had, however, been shown that 

 De Candolle's views involved an entire misconception of the mode of 

 growth. By the researches more especially of Mohl, it had been 

 proved that Monocotyledons were really not endogenous at all ; they 

 might, indeed, be more properly described as acrogenous. Then, 

 again, exogenous growth was by no means confined to Dicotyledonous 

 plants. Mr. Berkeley mentioned something very like it in a lichen 

 (Ipnea). It was well known to occur in Lessonia, the great sea-weed 

 of the Southern oceans, and according to Ruprecht also, in the allied 

 Laminaria digitata of our own shores. In Draccena, an undoubted 



