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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



into our discussions, and also because practical matters will be 

 treated of in these meetings by specialists of greater competence 

 than myself. 



It must suffice here to touch but lightly and superficially on 

 some points of interest to all plant-lovers, and the few points 

 selected must be taken as suggestive of the vast stores at the 

 disposition of the earnest student rather than as in any way 

 exhaustive. 



Antiquity. 



And first as to antiquity. We may smile at the fable of a 

 Montmorency swimming about in Noah's flood with the family 

 pedigree held in his mouth for safety, but the story, at any rate, 

 illustrates the respect we all more or less pay to a continuous 

 record of unbroken descent. But the pedigrees constructed by 

 genealogists and heralds are only as the records of seconds on the 

 limitless dial of Time. I shall not attempt to sketch even the 

 outHnes of the geological history of Conifers,'as it has been taught 

 us by Williamson, Carruthers, Starkie Gardner, and many others.* 

 It must suffice to say that the first traces of the order are met 

 with in the Devonian and Carboniferous series — shall we say 

 about half-way down the record of the earth's strata as we know 

 it ? but in any case so very long ago as to be utterly beyond 

 computation. 



But let us note particularly: The earliest Conifers of which 

 geologists tell us were Araucarias. Pines followed not long after 

 in the scale of geological time. Now these Araucarias and these 

 Pines are about the most highly organised of the Conifers of the 

 present day — and, so far as we can see, they were quite as highly 

 organised then as they are now. Moreover, it is certain that 

 many forms equally highly developed, or even more so, existed 

 then, and in still earlier times, which have since disappeared. We 

 must go still further back, then, for the origin of these Conifers. 

 But how much further back ? Who can tell? " Such know- 

 ledge is too wonderful for me. It is high — I cannot attain to it." 



* The reader will find an admirable epitome of the history of the Gymno- 

 sperms in Mr. Starkie Gardner's "British Eocene Flora," published by 

 the Paleontographical Society, in which the labours of British and Conti- 

 nental naturalists are summarised, and also in the learned and cautious 

 *' Fossil Botany " by Professor Count Solms-Laubach, of which an English 

 translation has just issued from the Clarendon Press. 



