Vice-President’s Address. 235 
that I may be thought very heterodox in the opinions I am 
now inclined to hold as to the ancestry of our club-mosses 
and horsetails. 
When we find in Carboniferous times certain fossils (some 
of which are included in my list under the name of Lycopodites, 
Goldenberg, not Brongt.), which, so far as one can observe, do 
not differ either in their manner of growth, foliage, or mode of 
fructification from recent Lycopods, and which some authors 
have boldly classed with Lycopodium, I am afraid, then, we 
can no longer indulge in the supposed noble ancestry of our 
little Lycopods, but must accept the fact that they most 
probably are descended, with little alteration, from com- 
paratively humble plants which never attained to arborescent 
dimensions. 
Lepidodendron, Bothrodendron, and Sigillaria appear to be 
genera which have passed away without having transmitted 
to us any posterity, even in a depauperated condition. 
As to the Calamites, I am here again afraid we must dis- 
card our old idea of their being the ancestors of our existing 
Lquisetum. 
The genus Lquisetwm seems to have existed in Carbonifer- 
ous times; whatever its ancestor was, by that time its earlier 
progenitor had apparently died out. The Hquwisetwm of paleeo- 
zoic times, however, seems to have been somewhat larger than 
any of the recent species, though it does not appear to have 
attained to gigantic dimensions, even in those far-back days. 
Calamites seem to have entirely disappeared, but the genus 
Calanites,as generally employed, is really more than a genus 
—it contains a group of plants, the fructification of which, 
though possessed of certain common structural characters, 
differed in many points, as in the mode of attachment of, and 
the position of the sporangia to the bracts and the axis of the 
cone. These differences are such, that, according to our 
modern ideas of classification, it would be impossible to place 
in one genus plants whose fructification differed in so many 
structural details. 
There is one more picture of our youth to which I wish to 
refer, and I am done. 
We were taught to believe that the low-lying ground of 
