BARK FLUTED AND SCARRED. 355 



Count Sternberg has applied the name Syringodendron to 

 many species of Sigillaria, from the parallel pipe-shaped 

 flutings that extend from the top to the bottom of their trunks. 

 These trunks are without joints, and many of them attain 

 the size of forest trees. The flutings on their surface bear 

 dot-like, or linear impressions, of various figures, marking 

 the points at which the leaves were inserted into the stem. 

 This fluted portion of the Sigillarige, formed their external 

 covering, separable like true bark from the soft internal axis, 

 or pulpy trunk ; it varied in thickness from an inch to one- 

 eighth of an inch, and is usually converted into pure coal. 

 (See PI. 56, Fig. 2. a, h, c.) 



A fleshy trunk surrounded and strengthened only by such 

 thin bark, must have been incapable of supporting large and 

 heavy branches at its summit. It therefore probably termi- 

 nated abruptly at the top, like many of the larger species of 

 living Cactus, and the abundant disposition of small leaves 

 around the entire extent of the trunk seems to favour this 

 hypothesis. 



The impressions, or scars, which formed the articulations 

 of leaves on the longitudinal flutings of the trunks of Sigil- 

 laria3, are disposed in vertical rows on the centre of each 

 fluting from the top to the bottom of the trunk. Each of 

 these scars marks the place from which a leaf has fallen ofl^, 

 and exhibits usually two apertures, by which bundles of 

 vessels passed through the bark to connect the leaves with 

 the axis of the tree. No leaf has yet been found attached 

 to any of these trunks ; we are therefore left entirely to 

 conjecture as to what their nature may have been. This 

 non-occurrence of a single leaf upon any one of the many 

 thousand trunks that have come under observation, leads us 

 to infer that every leaf was separated from its articulation, 

 and that many of them perhaps, like the fleshy interior of 



in diameter. The Jower end was broken off abruptly. Lindley and Hut- 

 ton's Foss. Flora, vol. i. p. 153. 



