THE WELLINGTONIA. 



Seqnoi'a gigante a Dec. 



The broad-leaved or fruit-bearing trees (" Angio- 

 sperms") belong to many widely separated Natural 

 Orders, and often have herbaceous plants as 

 their nearest allies. There is no evidence of the 

 group as a whole being of any very great geological 

 antiquity. It is, however, very different with the 

 Gymnosperms, those flowering plants without true 

 fruits, bearing their seeds exposed, generally on the 

 inner faces of scales forming a cone, which in sys- 

 tematic grouping are so strongly contrasted with 

 them, Their geological antiquity, their structural 

 isolation from other groups, and the strongly 

 differing types represented among the comparatively 

 few genera, cause these to stand apart, like the 

 monuments of a vanished race. They were the 

 most prominent members of the flora of the 

 whole earth for ages before the appearance of the 

 broad-leaved trees. All the existing representatives 

 of the group are trees or shrubs ; and though, in the 

 central pith, the annual rings of wood, and the 

 separable bark, their stems resemble those of broad- 

 leaved trees, in other respects, especially in their 

 floral organs, they approximate rather to the flower- 

 less Cryptogamia. Their seeds contain a store of 

 nutritive tissue or "albumen," and the embryo 

 develops two seed-leaves or " cotyledons," which may 



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