THE 
NEW PHYTOIiOGIST. 
Vol. 2., Nos. 4 & 5. May 30TH, 1903. 
THE SEED OF L YGINODENDRON. 
rPHE communication made to the Royal Society on May 7 th by 
| Professor Oliver and Dr. Scott contained the most important 
discovery bearing on the great problem of the connexion of 
the Flowering with the Flowerless plants which has been made since 
Hirasein 1896 found motile antherozoids in the pollen-tubes of Ginkgo. 
Hirase’s discovery, supplemented by those of Ikeno in Cycas and of 
Webber in Zamia, shewed that a character which had previously 
been thought to be confined to the Pteridophytes had been retained in 
a few of the Gymnosperms, and thus so to speak, pulled up a thread 
from below to bridge the gulf between the two classes. Oliver and 
Scott have now shewn that a coal-measure plant of fern-like habit and 
largely fern-like anatomy produced a structure which in most of its 
essential features must be called a seed, and have thus pulled down 
a thread from above to bridge the same gulf. When we consider, 
indeed, the extremely complete series of forms (making up Potonie’s 
group the Cycadofilices) which lead up from a typical fern-structure to 
typical Gymnosperm-structure in the details of vascular anatomy, 
and when we add to this the two discoveries which have just been 
alluded to, it becomes very doubtful whether we should any longer 
speak of a “gulf” between the Ferns and the Flowering Plants. 
Such an excellent bridge is being bit by bit erected, or to vary and per¬ 
haps improve the metaphor, the strait of water between the two 
land masses—a division at one time thought to be the most important 
in the plant-kingdom—is being so largely filled up with solid earth, that 
it is already nothing like so important, for instance, as that between 
the Bryophytes and Pteridophytes, or even as that separating the 
Bryophytes from the Algae. 
The essential point of the present communication is the con¬ 
clusion that the coal-measure seed Lagenostoma Lomaxi Williamson 
(MS), a seed with many of the essential features of a modern 
Gymnosperm, but of considerably more complicated structure, was 
