75 
at the Linnean Society . 
by a lantern slide which shewed a trace cut across in a tangential 
section of the wood. Such leaf-traces must have long ceased to be of 
any use to the plant. In this respect Araucaria appeared to resemble 
the Palaeozoic Lycopod Lepidodendron. The relationship between the 
reproductive organs of Araucaria and the Lycopods was a vexed 
question. There was certainly little or no resemblance between the 
male sporophylls of Araucaria and the corresponding structures in 
Lycopods. But the Araucarian male flowers did recall the 
cones of Equisetum and of Cheirostrobus. This last form was a 
generalised type combining the characters of Equisetaceae and 
Lycopods, and thus could be regarded as forming a link between 
Equisetum and Araucaria. With regard to the female cones of 
Araucaria he ventured to hold that the individual scales were single 
sporophylls, each homologous with a foliage leaf. Between the 
ovule and the distal end of the scale one found, as he would shew 
on the screen, a small outgrowth, called as a matter of convenience 
a “ligule.” On the scale of Agathis there was a very slight promi¬ 
nence corresponding in position with the more conspicuous ligule of 
Araucaria. It had been rather the fashion in recent years to 
consider the cone, of the pine for instance, not a flower, but an 
inflorescence; and each cone-scale a reduced axillary shoot in the 
axil of a subtending bract. This view had become so firmly fixed 
in the minds of many botanists that they had gone rather out of 
their way, he might say indeed very considerably out of their way, 
to bring all the other Conifers into line with it. But if Araucaria, 
for instance, was so much older and more primitive than the 
Abietineae, as he had endeavoured to shew that it was, why should 
its cone be interpreted in the light of the specialised Pinus ? Even 
if the axillary shoot theory were true of the Abietineas, he main¬ 
tained that it was not true of the Araucarieae. Could they now find 
indications of primitiveness in the structure of the ovules them¬ 
selves? There were a greater number of archegonia than in most 
Conifers, and they were scattered irregularly in the prothallium, as 
he would shew them on the screen; the same was true of 
Sequoia. This character might also be primitive. Some of these 
archegonia, too, did not communicate directly with the surface 
by means of a neck, and this was also true of Sequoia. They 
might now turn to the reasons which had led botanists to 
believe that the Conifers belonged to the Fern-Cycad stock. He 
ventured to consider those reasons wholly insufficient. One of 
them depended upon the Cordaiteae. The leaves of Cordaites were 
not unlike those of Agathis and the wood was practically identical 
with that of Araucaria. It had been generally assumed that that 
meant relationship, but the evidence appeared to him not to be good 
enough. The leaf-form clearly alone might be valueless as evidence. 
They all knew many cases of plants of widely different affinity in 
which the leaves were externally very similar. The internal structure of 
the leaves of the Araucarieae was, as a matter of fact, decidedly 
different from that of Cordaites. In the reproductive organs there 
was very little resemblance. He would admit that the axillary 
shoot theory, if applied to Araucaria, might furnish a point of 
contact with Cordaites, but this he submitted was deliberately 
reading complexity into simplicity. Some years ago certain petrified 
stems had been described, from lower Carboniferous strata, in 
which strands of primary wood occurred at the edge of the 
