428 BOTANICAL GAZETTE [DECEMBER 
tough little burros, or on the strongest mules, which can carry a pair 
of boxes of 200 pounds weight each. Hence, it more than once becomes 
necessary to break the splendid slabs all covered with leaf impressions, 
and often bearing flowers, which one can secure in even the smaller 
quarries almost without limit. 
But for a country so distant, there are many very distinct advan- 
tages and no final obstacles. Animals are trusty; the Indians are 
good and cheap workmen; one is everywhere met with great courtesy; 
it is a source of much interest to find the high degree of comfort to 
be had in some of the most distant of the towns and villages; the 
food is always good, and even in the far mountains one can always 
get eggs and tortillas. All in all, if one is only fairly fore-wise, to 
spend a winter in the sunshine, the forests, and amidst the grand 
scenery of the Mixteca alta is much more like enjoying oneself in 
some geological Sanatorium, as it were, than like-hard work. For 
the naturalist ever finds a thousand and one points of interest, and 
soon becomes accustomed to ride 20 to 50 miles a day as he may 
need; while if interested in the cycads he can find places farther 
_down the cafions and deep valleys where species of Dioon are fruiting 
hard by strata yielding the fossil forms in profusion. 
The great thickness of these Oaxacan plant beds has been noted; 
but as to their exact age I am not sure, it being as yet early to form 
a fair conclusion. Glossopteris, rather than merely the sage 
Pterids, is considered present; and there is also a wealth of taenio- 
pterids of older type, as well as a fine series of stems of a small but 
distinct lepidodendrid, and many leaves of Noeggerathiopsis Hislop 
Bunbury. But otherwise the facies is uppermost Triassic, if indeed 
Liassic genera may not in the end be found to preponderate. A 
similarity to the Gondwanas of India suggests itself. 
But what commands our attention at present, far beyond the 
precise age of these beds, is the fact that there abound in them In 
great variety the imprints, casts, and molds of many fruits of Wil 
liamsonia, closely associated with Zamites, Otozamites, Podozamites, 
Pterozamites, P tilophyllum, and Dictyozamites, fronds as well ae 
seeds. One of the strobili is a mold of just such an ovulate fruit as 
BUCKLAND figured under the name of Podocarya in the Bridgewater 
treatises, the original of which should be at Oxford, but could not be 
