448 Berry — Restoration of Neocalamites. 



branch which was distinctly bifacial in habit. It is 

 impossible to account for the uniform orientation of the 

 numerous whorls of leaves on these distichous branches 

 by appealing- to compression during fossilization, which 

 would not act with such uniformity, in fact the similar 

 condition of preservation among the vastly more abund- 

 ant materials of Paleozoic Annularias has led most 

 students to insist that in the latter the plane of the ver- 

 ticils was oblique to the axis in life. ' 



The internodes of Neocalamites knoivltoni were short ; 

 the vascular strands did not alternate at the nodes — a 

 much less important feature than was formerly supposed 

 to be the case ; the leaf-bearing branches were normally 

 opposite and superposed, so that the lateral branches 

 were bifacial. Ancestrally the leaf-bearing branches 

 must have been in whorls, but these, except the lateral 

 ones, were apparently gradually suppressed and rarely if 

 ever functionally developed. The leaf-bearing ultimate 

 branchlets were opposite laterals of the whorls of pri- 

 mary laterals of the main stem ; they were slender with 

 short internodes and bore whorls of nine or ten, super- 

 posed, apparently free, linear-lanceolate, equisized, thick, 

 uninerved leaves. 



The restoration of the complete plant shown one-twen- 

 tieth natural size in fig. 1 represents a plant that would 

 have looked familiar in a Carboniferous swamp environ- 

 ment, in fact the restoration is scarcely to be dis- 

 tinguished from various restorations that have been 

 attempted of the true Calamites of the Paleozoic which 

 had the Annularia type of foliage. A restoration of a 

 primary lateral branch is shown five-twelfths natural size 

 in fig. 2. This is somewhat more distinctive and brings 

 out clearly the bifacial character of these lateral branches 

 with their crowded leaf-bearing branchlets, although for 

 ease of depiction these are shown in a somewhat less 

 crowded condition than they were in life. 



It should perhaps be pointed out that Neocalamites 

 knoivltoni had shorter internodes, less numerous and rel- 

 atively very much shorter and broader leaves than the 

 other upper Triassic species that have been referred to 

 the genus Neocalamites. 



The Johns Hopkins University, 

 Baltimore. 



