1041 



ferous forests ; and the light and flexile covering which it gave to 

 undulating plain or gentle acclivity, must have contrasted not unpleas- 

 ingly-with the columnar trunks of fluted Sigillarige or scaly Lepido- 

 dendra, or with the huge rectilinear boles of gigantic Araucarians. 

 After several remarks on the numerous so-called species of Spheno- 

 pteris found at Burdiehouse, most of which Mr. M. regarded as but 

 mere varieties of a single species, he went on to state that he had an 

 opportunity of seeing, about six years before, though but for an 

 instant, the larger portion of a frond of Neuropteris gigantea. He 

 laid it open at a pit-mouth near Musselburgh, in a mass of gray shale, 

 sorely split and weathered ; but he could do little more than deter- 

 mine that, like Sphenopteris elegans, and the common bracken, it too 

 had a thick bare rachis, and that its pinnae, like its leaflets, were alter- 

 nate in their arrangement, when it fell to pieces in his hands. Mr. 

 Miller regretted that, during the glimpse which he enjoyed of this 

 beautiful frond, he failed to remark the order in which the larger 

 divisions of the rachis took place ; he merely saw, from the general 

 effect, that the frond as a whole, balanced on its strong club-formed 

 leaf-stem, was greatly massier than that of either Pteris aquilina or 

 Sphenopteris elegans ; and that in the clustered richness of its leaf- 

 lets, although not in their disposition, it resembled our recent Osmunda 

 regalis, or royal fern. So transient was his glimpse of the plant, that 

 it has since reminded him of those momentary glances caught, accord- 

 ing to tradition, of long-buried monarchs in their sepulchres, that in 

 one moment are seen august in all their robes, and in the next 

 descending before the admitted air into a shower of light dust. Mr. 

 Miller next exhibited and described a very fine, and in some respects 

 unique specimen of Ulodendron minus, which he had disinterred from 

 out a bed of ferruginous shale in the Water of Leith, a little above the 

 village of Colinton. Though little more than 10 inches in length by 

 3 in breadth, it exhibited no fewer than seven of those round beauti- 

 fully sculptured scars, ranged rectilinearly along the trunk or stem, by 

 which this ancient genus is so remarkably characterized. The speci- 

 men is covered with small, sharply relieved, obovate scales, most of 

 them furnished with an apparent midiib, and with their edges slightly 

 turned up ; and from these peculiarities, and their great beauty, are 

 suited to remind the architect of that style of sculpture adopted by 

 Palladio from his master, Vitruvius, when, in ornamenting the Corin- 

 thian or composite torus, he fretted it into closely imbricated obovate 

 leaves. These scales are ranged in elegant curves, which one of the 

 members of the Royal Physical Society, Mr. Charles Peach, as his 



