Carruthers — British Fossil Pandanem, 155 



This singular fruit has been lost. Buckland says it was in 1836 

 in the Oxford Museum, but Professor Philipps has never seen it. 

 Its re-discovery would be a real benefit to science. 



Through the kindness of S. Sharp, Esq., F.G.S., I have been 

 able to examine a remarkably perfect specimen of a fruit belonging 

 to the same genus as those described by Lindley, and supplying the 

 material which he desiderated in order to refer his fossils to their 

 positive position. This specimen was found in the Moulton Park 

 Quarries, at Kingsthorpe, near Northampton, in the White Limestone 

 of the Great Oolite. It was presented by A. Markham, Esq., to the 

 Northampton Museum, where it is now deposited. The matrix in 

 which it is preserved is an amorphous cream-coloured limestone 

 which has abounded in molluscan remains, but the shells have been 

 removed, and the spaces they occupied, as well as the other larger 

 cavities in the rock, are lined with or entirely filled up by crystallized 

 calcite. The fruit also is only a cast, in the same material, of the 

 cavity which originally contained it. The fine white mud had in- 

 sinuated itself into every crack and opening of the fruit, and filled 

 the decayed interior of the upper portion of the drupes. The walls 

 of the seed cavity and the seeds themselves, as well as the outer 

 membrane of the drupes, resisted decay until the matrix was some- 

 what compacted. These hard portions at length decayed, but the 

 insoluble carbon remained as a black amorphous substance, giving 

 an external coloured coating to the crystallized carbonate of lime, 

 which in the end filled the cavity, preserving in the most perfect 

 manner the form of the fruit, and even some of the minute details 

 as to the relation of the different parts. The hammer of the quarry- 

 man that accidentally laid open the fruit has fractured it through the 

 middle of the cells, the portion broken off containing the upper por- 

 tions of the cells and the apices of the drupes buried in the rock. 



The fruit consists of a thick spadix, — not so thick, however, in 

 proportion to the drupes as in Bryantia hutyrophora, Webb. The 

 drupes leave the spadix at a right angle about one-third from the 

 apex, those above have an ascending and those below a descending 

 direction, increasing as it reaches the fruit stalk, which is seen in 

 the fossil, and shown in the drawing. This arrangement is precisely 

 that of Sussea conoidea, Gaud. (PL IX. Fig. 7). The drupes are 

 rhomboidal at the base, spreading out laterally towards the apex, 

 where their form is a broad compressed rhomb (Fig. 4) two or three 

 times longer than it is broad. The cell containing the seed is near 

 the base of the fruit (Fig. 3) leaving only a short pedicle or being 

 really sessile, as in the recent species with single-seeded drupes 

 (Fig. 7). Each drupe contains a single seed ; and although, as I 

 have said, the whole structure is replaced by calcite, yet the details 

 are so beautifully shown that the connection of the seed by an in- 

 ternal unilateral placenta adnate to the whole length of the cell is in 

 many cases obvious (Fig. 6). The seed is ovoid and compressed 

 (Figs. 5 and 6), and the cicatrix at its base, by which it was attached 

 to the placenta, can be detected. 



The comparison of the drawings of Sussea conoidea, Gaud., taken 



