The Anatomy of Palaeostachya vera, 
BY 
GEORGE HICKLING, B.Sc. 
Assistant Lecturer in Geology in the Victoria University of Manchester. 
With Plates XXXII and XXXIII, and four Figures in the Text. 
ORE than thirty-seven years ago Williamson described before the 
!VX Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society 1 ‘A New Form 
of Calamitean Strobilus ’, from a fragmentary calcified specimen which 
Mr. Butterworth had found in a nodule from the Upper Foot Coal at Roe 
Buck, in Strinesdale, Saddleworth. The title of that paper is interesting. 
It was a ‘ new ’ Calamitean cone, because another had already been described 
by Carruthers and Binney, and the latter cone [Calamostachys) was admitted 
by Williamson to be Calamitean. Indeed, he states (p. 261) regarding the 
two cones that ‘ the differences which they present ’ are ‘ but generic, not 
ordinal ones ’, and, further on, he argues that his new cone must be 
Calamitean ‘since no one appears to doubt that such is the character 
of Mr. Binney’ s strobilus ’. Early in 1887 more specimens of the new 
cone were found among nodules from the Oldham district, and were 
described by Williamson in the same year before the Royal Society 2 as 
c The True Fructification of Calamites.’ As is well known, the title 
of this second paper was meant to emphasize Williamson’s later conviction, 
that Calamostachys could not be a Calamitean cone. With the true ardour 
of a man who is sure of his new belief, he tells us ‘ Mr. Carruthers believed 
he had found it [the fruit of Catamites] in Calamostachys Binneyana, and 
Mr. Binney arrived at a similar conclusion. I have always rejected these 
conclusions because of the conspicuous differences between the morphology 
of the Calamitean twig and that of the axis of Calamostachys l As 
a memorial of this new belief, Seward, 3 when he referred the ‘True 
Fructification ’ to Weiss’s genus Palaeostachya^ chose ‘ vera ’ as the specific 
designation. 
1 Williamson, ’69. 2 Ibid., '8 7. 3 Seward, ’98, p. 358 . 
[Annals of Botany, Vol. XXI. No. LXXXIII. July, 1907.] 
