314 



Systematic Paleontology 



trunks. An alternative course largely followed abroad would be to 

 consider them referable to the genus Bennettites of Carruthers. This is 

 the view advocated by Seward' and adopted by Potonie in Engler and 

 Prantls' Naturlichen Pflanzenfamilien. 



Solms-Laubach " has already referred many of the species of Bennett- 

 ites to Cycadeoidea restricting the former name to specimens showing 

 lateral axillary fructifications. Seward^ would use Cycadeoidea in a 

 somewhat different sense, for all cycadean trunks, whether short and 

 thick or tall and slender, which are covered with persistent leaf-bases. 



Fig. 5. — Transverse section of a partly emergent but still folded frond of 

 Cycadeoidea ingens deeply embedded in ramentum, X 4 (after Wieland). 



and which show no trace of lateral reproductive shoots such as character- 

 ize Bennettites gihsonianus Carruthers and allied forms, and which there 

 is no reason for including in the family Cycadacese. It has been shown 

 by Wieland* that fruition was the culminant event in the life of most, 

 if not all, the trunks which he investigated, fruits not being produced 



''■ Seward, Jurassic Flora, 1904, pt. ii, p. 44. 



"Capellini and Solms-Laubach, 1891, Mem. R. Accad. Sci. Inst. Bologna (5), 

 vol. ii, p. 161. 

 ' Seward, loc cit. 

 ■'Wieland, American Fossil Cycads, 1906. 



