GYMNOSPERM^. 



135 



antiquity and probably present in many fossil Floras, has often been overlooked in 

 consequence of its easily detached and insignificant fruits. 



Of the PoDOCARPEiE we have, perhaps, several representatives belonging to more 

 than one section of Podocarpus. The genus is a large one, and now almost confined to 

 the Southern Hemisphere, and no species inhabits any country nearer to us than Tropical 

 Africa. The species are still imperfectly known and resemble each other very consider- 

 ably. The fossils cannot, therefore, in most cases, be absolutely assigned to existing 

 species. 



Two of our most graceful forms belong to the interesting tribe of Araucarie^, 

 supposed by many botanists to have been extinct in European latitudes since the Jurassic 

 period. One of these is indistinguishable from Araiicaria Cimninghami, the Moreton-Bay 

 Pine, now limited to a somewhat restricted area in Northern Australia, and the other is 

 the remarkable extinct Z)o/^o5^frO(5^/5, uniting foliage something like that of the species just 

 mentioned, and utterly unlike that of any living Agatkis^ with fruit that can only be 

 placed with the latter genus. 



Nothing new has come to light regarding the British Eocene species of the extensive 

 Tribe AsiETiNEiE. The closed cones of two, if not three extinct species, have been 

 found in the littoral sands of the Thanet Beds, and another in the estuarine mud of the 

 London Clay. They formed no part of the inland Flora of the Middle Eocene so far as 

 the vegetable debris deposited in the fresh-water clays of the Lower and Middle Bagshot 

 Beds reveal. Not a vestige of them has ever been met with, not a solitary needle or 

 scale among the myriads of fruits and seeds and leaves that our Bagshot series has 

 yielded. But directly marine deposits are once more reached, as in the Bracklesham 

 and Barton Beds, they again appear, and in great variety,^ just as if they were fruits of 

 the sea and formed an integral part of marine Faunas instead of a terrestrial Flora. It 

 would almost appear that the Pine cones found stranded in the silts of our Middle 

 Eocene seas had been drifted there from long distances and other lands. It is a mere 

 conjecture, for they may equally have been brought down from the hills and uplands of 

 the interior ; but they certainly formed no part of the rich and varied forests whose falhng 

 leaves and fruits were floated and embedded at Bournemouth near to where they fell. 

 They are equally absent in all the Upper-Eocene and Oligocene fresh-water beds, from 

 Hordwell to Hempstead, and rich as many of these are in plant remains, Pine cones only 

 reappear in one brackish-water mud bed of the Bembridge Marl. 



In the Irish and Scotch Basalts, of Lovi'er Eocene age, they occur in only one deposit 

 of plants, out of many. But where they are present, at Ballypalady, they abound beyond 

 every other plant ; their bark, branches, and seeds, their needles, solitary and in clusters, 

 and their cones open and closed, prove to how large an extent the neighbouring forests 

 must have been composed of Pine trees. Except for a chain of accidental circumstances, 



1 A collection made during 1 885 has shown that there are species at Highcliff distinct from those of 

 the Bracklesham Beds. 



