74 THE EVOLUTION OF THE FLOWERS 



served in the coal, that they had seed and seed organs 

 instead of the usual spores. They were branching, 

 as all living families do. One branch of the coal 

 forest plants was, under the stress of the Ice Age, 

 going to produce the pine and fir, the cones of which 

 are neither flowers nor spores. Another branch, the 

 seed-bearing ferns, was going to produce the flowering 

 plants. ^ 



The crude green "flowerets" of these seed-bearing 

 ferns are almost lost in the confusion of the Permian 

 Revolution, and it would be a sin against the purpose 

 of this little book to follow botanists in their learned 

 attempts to trace the evolution. It is enough that 

 the Ice Age closed the long reign of the lowly spore- 

 bearing plants, and opend the era of flowering plants 

 and conifers. We saw the Mesozoic plains were 

 covered with Cycads, palm-like plants with crude 

 types of flowers, or "fructifications." The colours we 

 can only estimate. Probably at first they were pre- 

 dominantly green, and, as time went on, yellow gained 

 upon the green. It is not thought that these were 

 the parents of our flowering plants. Probably some 

 hardy seed-bearing type of fern remained, during the 

 age of the great reptiles, on higher and cooler levels, 

 waiting, like the bird and mammal, for the return of 

 the cold. 



^ See, for a short and authoritative account, D. H. Scott's Evolu- 

 tion of Plants (in the "Home University Library"). It is not 

 simple reading. 



