96 CRITIQUES AND ADDRESSES. [v. 



wich. With much sagacity, Professor Morris divined the 

 real nature of these bodies, and boldly affirmed them 

 to be the spore-cases of a plant allied to the living 

 club-mosses. 



But discovery sometimes makes a long halt ; and it is 

 only a few years since Mr. Carruthers determined the 

 plant (or rather one of the plants) which produces these 

 spore-cases, by finding the discoidal sacs still adherent 

 to the leaves of the fossilized cone which produced them. 

 He gave the name of Flemingites gracilis to the plant 

 of which the cones form a part. The branches and stem 

 of this plant are not yet certainly known, but there is 

 no sort of doubt that it was closely allied to the Lepi- 

 dodendron, the remains of which abound in the coal 

 formation. The Lepidodendra were shrubs and trees, 

 which put one more in mind of an Araucaria than of 

 any other familiar plant ; and the ends of the fruiting 

 branches were terminated by cones, or catkins, somewhat 

 like the bodies so named in a fir, or a willow. These 

 conical fruits, however, did not produce seeds ; but the 

 leaves of w T hich they were composed bore upon their 

 surfaces sacs full of spores or sporangia, such as those 

 one sees on the under surface of a bracken leaf. Now, it 

 is these sporangia of the Lepidodendroid plant Fleming- 

 ites which were identified by Mr. Carruthers with the 

 free sporangia described by Professor Morris, which are 

 the same as the large sacs of which I have spoken. And, 

 more than this, there is no doubt that the small sacs 

 are the spores, which were originally contained in the 

 sporangia, 



The living club-mosses are, for the most part, insigni- 

 ficant and creeping herbs, which, superficially, very 

 closely resemble true mosses, and none of them reach 

 more than two or three feet in height. But, in their 

 essential structure, they very closely resemble the earliest 



