SALTER A CHRISTMAS LECTURE ON COAL, 



127 



Lepidodendron differed from Sigillaria in the arrangement of the 

 leaf-scars, which pack closely in quincunx fashion over the surface. 

 Out sketch shows this. The patterns are equally beautiful and as 

 applicable to pictorial design as in the other case. The diamond 

 shape of the scars will help you easily to recognise fragments. 



There are many species of these trees. The commonest of all I think 

 is the L. Stembergii, of which a full length figure is to be found in 

 the revised edition of Dr. Mantell's excellent book — "Jones's Won- 

 ders," as it ought to be called — p. 749. I have only given you frag- 

 ments of branches, stems, leaves, fruit cones and their seeds or 



Stem (a), and leaves, catkin (b), seed-vessels (e), and seeds or spores (d) of Lepidodendron. 

 We have added (e) its supposed root Halonia. 



spores. It is well known now that Lepidostrobus (b) is the 

 fruit or catkin o± Lepidodendron. The little mountain club- 

 moss, which rears its yellow catkins amid the sheltering boughs 

 of the heather, — its stem clothed with long scale-like leaves, — 

 is the best representative, in England at least, of these old giant 

 forms, as large as forest-trees, which abounded so greatly in the 

 times of the coal. 



There is yet another plant, so very common in coal-shales, that it 

 ought to be mentioned separately. I mean the Galamites. We have 

 not space for a figure, and refer you to the book above quoted, p. 

 736, where the plant is, however, drawn upside down in fig. 3 — quite 

 right in figs 1 and 2. The look of these plants is so much that of the 

 horsetail (Equisetum) of our ditches, that it is no wonder ordinary 

 fossil-hunters should take them for blood-relations. 



* And I have added the Halonia, which I fully believe to be the root of 

 Lepidodendron. 



