AN AMERICAN LEPIDOSTROBUS 
CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE HULL BOTANICAL LABORATORY 144 
Joun M. CovuLtTeER AND W. J. G. LAND 
(WITH PLATES XXVIII AND XXIX AND THREE FIGURES) 
The remarkable uncovering of the structure of paleozoic strobili 
and seeds during the last decade, chiefly from sections of English 
and French material, has brought to the American morphologist 
a feeling of disappointment that the extensive American Coal- 
measure deposits have yielded these structures only as impressions 
or casts. Extended inquiry has failed to discover such petrified 
material in any of the collections, so that its occurrence is evidently 
quite unusual. 
A short time since there came into our hands, through the 
courtesy of Dr. Stuart WELLER, of the Department of Geology 
of this university, a specimen of Lepidostrobus, the strobilus of 
Lepidodendron, that was evidently petrified. It had been collected 
in 1900, in a coal pocket in Warren County, Iowa; and in January 
I91r came into the possession of Professor JoHN L. TILTON, of 
Simpson College, Indianola, Iowa, who brought it to this university, 
and in whose collection a portion of the sectioned cone is to be found. 
The specimen is not a complete strobilus, but a fragment from 
near the upper end, broken at an angle above, and squarely across 
below. As a consequence, if the strobilus was heterosporous, all 
evidence of the megasporangia had disappeared with the missing 
lower portion. The fragment is 6 cm. long and 5 cm. in diameter 
at base, and all the structures proved to be very well preserved 
except the axis (figs. 1 and 2), which had been almost completely 
destroyed and replaced by calcite and pyrites. The strobilus was 
a mature one, which had fallen and remained in the water or moist 
soil, for rootlets had penetrated between the sporophylls here and 
there, and the rootlets in turn had been attacked by a fungus. 
Nearly all of the sporangia are empty, only a few spores being 
Occasionally in place, but masses of spores occur in many places 
between the sporophylls. 
449] [Botanical Gazette, vol. 51 
