138 Morphology BOOK i 



scientific spirit, that we find him writing after the brilliant 

 career of the years 1870-90, ' My morphological inquiries 

 seem to have reached a stage that makes a more minutely 

 careful examination of these questions of development 

 and growth desirable, but before specially undertaking 

 this, I saw clearly the extreme importance of doing so 

 in combination with some younger colleague, whose famili- 

 arity with the details of the physiology of living plants was 

 greater than my own.' One of the most important fruits 

 of this new partnership was the reinvestigation of Lygino- 

 dendron and Heterangium, which served really as the 

 starting-point of the recognition of the great group of 

 plants which, showing characters allied to both Cycads 

 and Ferns, was called Cycadofilices at the suggestion of 

 Potonie in 1897, and one of which, Lyginodendron, through 

 the agency of Oliver and Scott, was found shortly after 

 the close of the century to have borne the seed Lagenostoma, 

 whose relations up to that time were wholly unknown. 

 Following this discovery, succeeded very quickly by others, 

 we have had the recognition of the seed-bearing habit as 

 no longer the distinctive mark of the Phanerogams, but 

 shared by the group in question. These, now renamed the 

 Pteridosperms, were in fact primitive Phanerogams. But 

 these momentous discoveries belong to the next century. 



Attention should be called not only to investigators, but 

 to authors who wrote during these years. Probably the first 

 place should be accorded here to Solms-Laubach, whose 

 Fossil Botany had a great influence on contemporary 

 opinion, and was certainly the best textbook that had 

 appeared up to that time. Mention should be made also 

 of Seward's Fossil Plants, 1898, Schenk's Palaeophytologie, 

 1891, Zeiller's Elements de Palc'obotanique of 1900. 



The close of 1900 showed in England a scene of consider- 

 able activity. Many workers were already in the field, 

 and material had so far accumulated that it was becoming 



