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the spore -producing lycopods aud the seed-producing gymnosperni; 

 had a common ancestry. What that ancestry was, I must really 

 ask you to find out, just, however, giving myself the gratification 

 of throwing one difficulty in your way, and it is this — rocks as old 

 as the Carboniferous tell us of gymnosperms as highly oryanised as 

 those we see growing to-day. The evolutionist, however, seeks 

 other aid than that of geology. He goes minutely into the 

 structure of the pollen grains and the ovules, and notes the 

 peculiarity of the embryo, and the mode of fertilization and 

 germination, finding a good deal of suggestion as to the affinity 

 of conifers with the vascular cryptograms, especially selaginellas. 

 Modern text books insist upon this affinity — one of them in these 

 words : Gymnosperms are quite as closely allied to the higher 

 Cryptograms as the divisions of the latter are to each other. 



How easy it is to see that in any special branch of study one 

 man builds on another man's foundation. Robert Brown, that 

 prince of botanists, in the early part of this century, was the first 

 to enquire closely into those structural peculiarities that have 

 since been more fully studied, and have led botanists to those 

 conclusions that are now generally accepted. 



I will now briefly take you through the leading characters of the 

 order of the cone -bearers, and then pass on to informatien of a 

 more general kind. 



Coniferae. — A family of trees or shrubs comprising about 30- 

 genera, and about 300 species, of exogenous habit, and usually 

 resinous, and with few exceptions, evergreen. Wood with indistinct 

 medullary rays and no true vascular tissue. Cells of the wood disc- 

 bearing, that is to say, furnished with circular markings, which 

 are not found in other kinds of wood (these discs are easily seen 

 under the microscope). Leaves usually linear, like those of 

 grasses, or needle-shaped, or small and scale-like. In Pinus, much 

 the largest genus, the needle-shaped leaves are either in j^airs, as, 

 in the Scotch pine, or in clusters of three or five. In the larch, , 

 one of the most valuable of conifers, the leaves are in clusters and 

 deciduous. In arbor-vitaes and others, the leaves are very small, 

 and overlap like green scales. Flowers of txvo kinds, usually _ on 

 the same trees. The stamen-bearing ones arranged in catkins, 

 very sm/»/e in structure (as in willows). Calyx and corolla none.. 

 Pistillate flowers, if they may be called such, without perianth and 

 style, consisting of a sinyle naked ovule, or of a number of ovules. 

 Fruit, a more or less woody cone, a berry-like modification of the 

 cone (called a galbulus), or a solitary naked seed, seated in a sort 

 of cup. Seeds often winged. The relationship of a pine cone to 

 a juniper berry and the fruit of the yew is not, at first, clear, but 

 it is very real. Look at the so-called berry of the yew. There is 



