SS THE LIVING CYCADS 



a height of twenty meters, or sixty-five feet. This is 

 certainly a mistake. Dr. F. M. Bailey, in his Queensland 

 Flora, states that the species reaches a height of eight 

 to ten feet and sometimes twice that height. Directors 

 of botanical gardens said that twenty feet was the limit. 

 Mr. Snell, who had lived and hunted in the Cycas media 

 region for many years, showed me the tallest specimen 

 that he had ever seen, and it measured a few inches less 

 than twenty feet in height. I saw the species at various 

 places over a range of 700 miles, and the tallest specimen 

 examined measured a little more than twenty-two feet 

 in height. The person who started the mistake may 

 have confused meters and feet or, more likely, may have 

 applied to Cycas media the height of Macrozamia Hopei, 

 which really reaches a height of sixty feet. 



Cycas is the only genus in which the male and female 

 cones, in their external appearance, show any marked 

 difference except in size. The male cone looks about 

 like that of other cycads, but the female consists of a 

 large number of reduced leaves bearing seeds on their 

 margins and not crowded together into a compact cone 

 as shown in Fig. 14. The earliest seed plants, as far 

 back as the Paleozoic age, bore their seeds on the margins 

 of more or less modified leaves, so that in this respect 

 Cycas shows the most primitive condition to be found in 

 the plant kingdom. In all the cycads the *' scales" of 

 both rriale and female cones are modified leaves, but all 

 have' digressed farther than Cycas from the primitive 

 condition. 



The genera have been treated separately, but in 

 many places two genera were often growing together. 

 At Rockhampton, Cycas and Macrozamia were almost 



