﻿Manchester Memoirs, Vol xlix. (1905), No. 18. 27 



carboniferous flora, has been described as the Reign of 

 the Higher Cryptogams. This description can no longer 

 be maintained. If, as we have found reason to believe,, 

 half, or more than half, the so-called Ferns of those days 

 were really seed-bearing plants, while many of the Lyco- 

 pods had likewise assumed the seed-habit on a line of 

 their own, it follows that at that relatively early period 

 the Spermophyta had already put themselves on even 

 terms with the Sporophyta, perhaps had begun to gain 

 the upper hand. The outward aspect of a Carboniferous 

 forest may, it is true, have been suggestive of some huge 

 tropical fern-house, but this appearance would have been 

 an illusion, for a great proportion of the plants of crypto- 

 gamic habit would prove, if we examined them more 

 closely, to bear true seeds, or organs indistinguishable 

 from seeds, on their fronds or cones. 



In the flora of the present day it rarely happens (as in 

 the classical case of the Cycad, Stangeria) that the habit 

 of a plant leaves us in doubt as to its Cryptogamic or 

 Phanerogamic nature. In the Carboniferous era such 

 doubts would have been prevalent enough, and even if we 

 called in structure to our aid, it would often have been 

 hard to determine on which side of the boundary line a 

 given plant was to be placed. The Lycopods with seed- 

 like organs, for example, seem to have differed in no other 

 respect from their still purely Cryptogamic relatives, and 

 among the Fern-series there are plants well-known in 

 their vegetative morphology and anatomy, as to the true 

 position of which we are still completely in doubt. In 

 fact, when we go back to the carboniferous flora, we are 

 approaching a time when the distinction between seed- 

 plants and spore-plants was not yet one of the great 

 frontiers dividing up the vegetable kingdom. 



It is one of the great triumphs of the French School 



