Obituary . — David Thomas Gwynne- Vaughan. xxi 
interpretations, but the value of the work accomplished by Kidston and 
Gwynne-Vaughan is solid and lasting. 
Two more palaeobotanical memoirs by the same authors remain to be 
noticed. The first of these (K. and G.-V., 1911) gives the first intelligible 
and satisfactory account of the structure of Tempskya , a group of fossils 
which had puzzled palaeobotanists ever since the year 1824. Tempskya 
consists of a dense mass of Fern roots, traversed by a number of larger 
organs, variously described as petioles or stems. The authors investigated 
an unusually good specimen of a Tempskya from Russian Turkestan, which 
they named T. Rossica . They found that it consisted of a number of 
solenostelic Fern stems, running longitudinally through a dense felt of their 
own adventitious roots. The stems bear two rows of leaves on one side 
and roots on the other, thus showing themselves to be of dorsiventral 
structure. They keep parallel to each other and to the general course 
of the roots, but face indiscriminately in all directions. They branch dichoto- 
mously. The authors interpretation of the facts is that the numerous stems 
with their felt of roots together formed an erect ‘ false stem the individual 
true stems becoming free at the top and bearing the leaves. A restoration 
of the plant as it is conceived to have appeared in nature was prepared ; 
it was not published with the paper, but was shown at the British Asso- 
ciation Meeting at Sheffield in 1910, and has been reproduced in Dr. Marie 
C. Stopes’s British Museum Catalogue of the Cretaceous Flora, Part II, p. 15. 
This interpretation of the structure receives support from the analogy 
of a recent Tree-fern, Hemitelia cremdata , described by Schoute in 1906; 
in this strange plant a number of branches are actually felted together by 
a mass of their own roots, to form a false stem. 
The excellent paper on Tempskya , as it appeared in the Transactions 
of a Russian Society, is not very accessible to English readers, but a full 
abstract will be found in Dr. Stopes’s Catalogue, above referred to. 
The memoir on Stenomyelon tuedianuni , Kidston (K. and G.-V., 1912), 
was intended to form the first of a series on the Carboniferous Flora of 
Berwickshire. So many important forms remain to be described, that it is 
to be hoped that Dr. Kidston, in spite of the grievous loss of his collaborator, 
will see the scheme through. 
Stenomyelon , originally found by Matheson in 1859, and re-discovered 
by Kidston, who obtained much better specimens, in 1901, is of Lower 
Carboniferous age, and is a remarkable and isolated form, referred to the 
transitional group which we call Cycadofilices. The structure is well 
preserved, and the investigation does it justice. The memoir is clear, full, 
concise, and perfectly illustrated, and may well serve as a model of structural 
work in palaeobotany. 
We have now passed in rapid survey through all the published work 
in which Gwynne-Vaughan took part. 
