rgts] BURLINGAME—ARAUCARIANS II 
The conclusion is indicated by the following quotations: “To 
the writer the evidence seems to point . . . . to the primitiveness 
in the Coniferales of a type bearing female cones composed of 
aggregations of simple sporophylls, each sporophyll bearing a 
single erect axillary ovule.” ‘This supposed primitive conifer 
is very suggestive of the Lycopodiales, but is not reminiscent of 
the Cordaitales.”’ 
It is evident from the preceding that, aside from what support 
may be gained by discrediting rival theories, the lycopod theory 
derives its greatest strength from the three following sources. 
The first and strongest argument comes from the very close 
resemblance in form and structure of the ovulate araucarian cone 
to the strobilus of the lycopods. If there were no other reasons 
for suspecting a filicinean origin of araucarians, and there were no 
Abietineae with their perplexing structures, no one would, I think, 
even suspect that the ovulate cone is other than what it appears 
to be. Notwithstanding these influences most (though not all, 
20, 42, 59) investigators (44, 61, 69, 76) who have studied the 
araucarian cone have concluded that it is really simple in structure 
and its cone scales simple sporophylls. 
Next in importance and even more difficult to dispose of is the 
structure of the seed and pollen tube. Srwarp and Forp have 
pointed out the close resemblance of the seed structure (54) and 
the writer has elsewhere (7) shown that these structures could 
easily have arisen from the condition found in Miadesmia and 
Lepidocarpon, but that it is exceedingly difficult to see how, and 
still more difficult to see why, they should have arisen from the 
known types of cordaitean seeds. It is easy to see how pollination 
of the scale instead of the nucellus would be the most probable 
type in plants which developed the strobiloid habit before the 
pollination and seed habit. But it seems hardly probable that 
having been in possession of the habit. of depositing pollen grains 
in a specially prepared and protected pollen chamber in the nucellus,’ 
any group of plants would pass through a course of evolution requir- 
ing them to give up all the advantages comprised in these arrange- 
ments and to acquire an entirely new and certainly less efficient 
method of pollination. Considering how very little we know of the 
