64 



BRITISH EOCENE FLORA. 



Thanet Beds, East Kent. 



The cones are cylindrical, slightly tapering, blunt at both ends, and measure from 

 eleven to thirteen centimetres in length by some fifty-tive millimetres in breadth. They 

 possess a somewhat slender axis, about five millimetres in diameter, from which the 

 scales are given off at first at obtuse angles, and then, just beyond the seeds, bend 

 sharply upwards with a slightly outward direction. The terminations of the scales are 

 large, roughly hexagonal, ten millimetres thick, and about thirteen millimetres in 

 diameter. Their surfaces are smooth and unornamented, but slightly convex towards the 

 centre of the upper portion of the scale. Each scale supports two seeds in the hollowed 

 inferior surface near its base, about half an inch long, and possibly wingless. A remark- 

 able character about this and the following species is that the basal scales are larger than 

 those of the body. Mr. Carruthers describes them as "barren, and the apophyses rise 

 from their whole surface ; in the series immediately above them there is a short flat body 

 to the scale, but the greater portion of the scale is covered with the apophysis ; the third 

 series are fertile and have a longer and more ascending body." The cone has externally 

 a cycadean aspect, but internally the structure is that of a true Pine. Corda appears to 

 have first recognised its true nature in 1846,^ and three years later Brongniart, having 

 apparently received a specimen from Mr. Wetherell, still more positively stated, from the 

 form and direction of the scales and the position of the double seeds at their base, that 

 it was the cone of a Pine and not of a Cycad. The great size of the basal scales suffices 

 to distinguish it from all existing Pines, but this character alone scarcely seems to 

 warrant our placing the species in the doubtful genus Pinites, in which many of the 

 Secondary Coniferse find an appropriate place, Carruthers compares it to Pinus pinea, 

 a very solid, bluntly ovate cone, five or six inches in length, containing large shortly- 

 winged seeds, inhabiting the Mediterranean borders from Spain to Greece. 



The fossils, through some vagueness as to their exact derivation, were once thought 

 to be Cretaceous, but they are undoubtedly Eocene. Mr. Dowker showed me a very fine 

 specimen which he obtained in a pit of nearly pure sand just above the Infirmary of the 

 Canterbury Barracks, which was unfossiliferous at the time of my visit. 



The specimen (fig. 7) is stated by Henslow ^ to have been " discovered in cleaning 

 out a pond four miles from Deal, on the road to Canterbury." Mr. Dowker has, 

 however, I believe, found more than one specimen in situ^ and is able to fix their precise 

 horizon in the Thanet Beds, near Reculvers. 



^ Reuss, 'Verst. d. Boehm. Kreidef.,' 1846. 

 ^ Lindley and Huttoii, ' Foss. Flora,' p. 117. 



