74 
“ The Origin of Gymnosfierms ” 
the Abietineze were older than the Araucarieze. So far as the fossil 
evidence went there was no support at all for such a view. A case 
on which some stress had been laid was Nathorst’s example of an 
Abietineous cone from the Rhzetic. If one examined Nathorst’s 
figures one was forced to conclude that by itself this cone is of 
practically no value as evidence of the antiquity of the Abietineze, 
and the view of the geological age of the Abietineze rested almost 
entirely on evidence of that kind. They might now turn to the 
Araucarieze. The fossil evidence on which they might rely to 
establish the age of a group was of three kinds, petrifactions 
shewing structure, impressions of twigs, etc., and lastly, and most 
important, impressions of cones, i.e., of the reproductive organs. 
In the Palzeozoic rocks they found an abundance of petrified wood 
so like that of the modern Araucarieze that it might be said to be 
identical with it. Much of this, however, was really Cordaitean. 
And in many cases the difficulty of determining whether such wood 
really belonged to Araucarieze or to Cordaiteze was practically 
insuperable. The occurrence of this wood did, however, shew that 
this was a very old type of wood, to whatever plants it belonged. 
In the lower Mesozoic zilso, such as the Liassic of Whitby, there 
was some abundance of Araucarian wood. The Palzeozoic impression 
Volkia described by Renault from the Permian, bore rather a 
striking resemblance to a modern Araucaria. Sometimes, even, it 
had reproductive shoots with monospermic cone-scales. Also 
Araucarian wood had been found in connexion with the Volkia 
impressions. Hence we were perhaps justified in assuming a 
relationship here, and probably also in the case of Pagiophyllum , 
whose twigs, abundant in the Liassic, were externally like those of 
Araucaria. These pieces of evidence taken together had weight, 
though they were not perhaps conclusive individually. In the 
Mesozoic rocks, particularly the Jurassic, Araucarian cones were by 
no means uncommon. They were found in India, Australia, Britain, 
France and other parts of the world. Some were very well 
preserved and agreed in important respects, such as the broad scale, 
its narrow membranous margin, and the single seed, with modern 
Araucarieze. There could, then, be very little doubt that the Araucarieze 
were very abundant and widely distributed in the earlier Mesozoic, 
certainly far more so than the Abietineae. If they granted the age of 
the group, were the Araucarieae also primitive? He ventured to main- 
tziin that they were. One character which suggested primitiveness 
was the very gradual transition from the ordinary foliage leaves to 
the sporophylls. This could be seen from the lantern slide shewn 
in A. Mulleri and A. Cookii, and the same was true of the female 
cone of A. imbricata, the Monkey-puzzle. It was certainly not the 
casein manyotherConiferze. Then the question arose whether there 
were primitive anatomical characters in modern Araucarieze. The 
wood was uniform and simple and consisted almost entirely of tracheids 
with multiseriate bordered pits on their radial walls. There was 
also no xylem parenchyma that he could find, and Professor 
Penhallow of Montreal, who had carefully investigated the genus, 
agreed in that view, though contrary statements had been previously 
made. There was another character of Araucarieze, to which Sir 
W. Thiselton-Dyer had recently called attention, and that was the 
persistence of the leaf-traces in the wood even of trunks which 
might be as much as fifty years old. He would illustrate this 
