[ 41 ] 
III. On the Organization of the Fossil Plants of the Coal-measures . — Part V. Astero- 
phyllites. By W. C. Williamson, F.B.S., Professor of Natural History in the 
Owens College , Manchester. 
Received May 17, 1873, — Read June 19, 1873. 
In 1871 I published, in the 5th volume of the third series of the £ Memoirs of the 
Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester,’ a description of a new Cryptogamic 
fruit, to which I gave the provisional name of VoTkmannia Dawsoni. One of the most 
remarkable features of this curious organism was seen in a transverse section of its 
central vascular axis, which appeared to be a triangular structure with truncated angles. 
When the above memoir was read (February 7, 1871) I had seen no stem having a 
similar structure ; but after a careful study of the fruit, I said, “ The verticillate 
arrangement of its bractigerous disks and bracts suggests the probability that we must 
seek for the parent plant amongst such as have their foliage arranged in corresponding 
verticils ; and if this law of association be a sound one, we are apparently shut up to 
the three genera, Aster op hy l lites, Annularia , and Sphenophyllum After reviewing 
the various features of these plants, I arrived at the conclusion that “ it is the fruit 
either of Asterophyllites or of Sphenophyllum ; and, judging from the general aspect of 
its bractigerous disks, I am more disposed to identify it with the former than with the 
latter ” f. I was not at that time aware that Professor Renault, of Cluny, had found a 
stem at Autun having a similar triangular axis, and which he also had referred to 
Sphenophyllum (‘ Comptes Rendus,’ 1870). My attention was at once directed to the 
discovery of true stems having a similar structure, and I soon found a few examples in 
the cabinets of Messrs. Butterworth and Whittaker of Oldham. But these gave me 
no such evidence as I required respecting the nature of the foliage with which these 
stems had been clothed, neither did any of them afford proof even that the plant 
had been a jointed one. I then turned to the coal-seam from which the fossil strobilus 
was obtained, and was at length rewarded by the discovery of a cluster of stems, each 
one of which was clothed with its peculiar bark, having the enlarged lenticular nodes 
exquisitely preserved, and the verticils of Asterophyllite-leaves radiating from the thin 
margin of each nodal disk in precisely the same way as the bracts had done from the 
corresponding portions of the fruit already described. What had previously been an 
inferred probability thus became an established fact ; hence I have now no hesitation 
whatever in referring both the above fruit and the stems which I am about to describe 
to the genus Asterophyllites. Amongst the other specimens sent to me from Burntis- 
* hoc. cit. p. 34. 
MDCCCLXXIV. 
G 
t Ibidem , p. 37. 
