580 
ME. E. W. BINNEY ON SOME LOWER-COAL-SEAM FOSSIL PLANTS. 
selected to describe and illustrate it. His memoir will always be considered as one of 
the most valuable ever contributed on the fossil flora of the Carboniferous period. 
In 1849, August Joseph Corda published his ‘Beitrage zur Flora der Vorwelt,’ a 
work of great labour and research. Amongst his numerous specimens, he describes and 
illustrates one of Piploxylon cycadoideum, which, although not to be compared to 
Brongxiaet’s specimen, still affords us valuable information, confirming some of that 
author’s views rather than affording much more original information. All these last 
three specimens Brongniart, in his ‘Tableau de vegetaux fossiles consideres sous le 
point de vue de leur classification botanique et de leur distribution geologique,’ pub- 
lished in 1849, classes as Dicotyledones gymnospermes under the family of Sigil- 
larees; amongst other plants his Sigillaria elegans , Witham’s Anabathra , and Corda’s 
Piploxylon. 
In 1862 the writer published an account of specimens in the ‘ Quarterly Journal of 
the Geological Society’ of that year, which confirmed the views of the three learned 
authors above named as to Sigillaria and Piploxylon being allied plants ; he also showed 
that their supposed pith or central axis was not composed of cellular tissue, but of 
different sized vessels arranged without order, having their sides barred by transverse 
striae like the internal vascular cylinders of Sigillaria and Lepidodendron. These speci- 
mens were in very perfect preservation, and showed the external as well as the internal 
characters of the plants. 
All the above specimens were of comparatively small size, with the exception of that 
described by Corda, which, although it showed the external characters in a decorticated 
state, did not exhibit any outward cylinder of a plant allied to Sigillaria with large ribs 
and deep furrows so commonly met with in our coal-fields, but rather to plants allied to 
Sigillaria elegans and Lepidodendron. 
In the present communication it is intended to describe some specimens of larger 
size than those previously alluded to, and to endeavour to show that the Sigillaria vascu- 
laris gradually passes as it grows older into ribbed and furrowed Sigillaria , and that 
this singular plant not only possessed two woody cylinders, an internal one and an external 
one, both increasing on their outsides at the same time, but likewise had a central axis 
composed of hexagonal vessels, arranged without order, having all their sides marked 
with transverse striae. Evidence will also be adduced to show that Sigillaria dichoto- 
mized in its branches something like Lepidodendron, and that, as in the latter plant, a 
Lepidostrobus was its fructification. The outer cylinder in large Sigillaria was com- 
posed of thick-walled quadrangular tubes or utricles arranged in radiating series, and 
exhibiting every appearance of having been as hard-wooded a tree as Pinites, but as yet 
no disks or striae have been observed on the walls of the tubes. Stigmaria is now so 
generally considered to be the root of Sigillaria, that it is scarcely necessary to bring 
any further proof of this proposition ; but specimens will be described which will prove 
by similarity of structure that the former is the root of the latter. 
The chief specimens described in this memoir are eight in number, and were found 
