Ancient Plants: Being a Simple Account of the past Vegetation of the Earth and of the Recent Important Discoveries Made in This Realm of NatureStopes, Marie Carmichael
Science
Ancient Plants: Being a Simple Account of the past Vegetation of the Earth and of the Recent Important Discoveries Made in This Realm of Nature
Stopes, Marie Carmichael
Paleobotany
Such very young stems are rare, for the development of secondary wood
began early, and it soon greatly exceeded the primary wood in amount.
Fig. 114 shows a photograph of a stem in which the secondary wood is well
developed. The primary triangle of wood is still to be seen in the
centre, and corresponds to that in fig. 113, while closely fitting to it
are the bays of the first-formed secondary wood, which makes the wood
mass roughly circular. Outside this the secondary wood forms a regular
cylinder round the axis, which shows no sign of annual rings. The cells
of the wood are large and approximately square in shape, while at the
angles formed at the junction of every four cells is a group of small,
thin-walled parenchyma, see fig. 115. There are no medullary rays going
out radially through the wood, such as are found in all other zones of
secondary wood, and in this arrangement of soft tissue the plants are
unique.
[Illustration: Fig. 114.—_Sphenophyllum_, Transverse Section with
Secondary Wood W. At _c_ the cork formation is to be seen.
(Microphoto.)]
Beyond the wood was a zone of soft tissue and phloem, which is not often
preserved, while outside that was the cork, which added to the cortical
tissues as the stem grew (see fig. 114, _c_).
[Illustration: Fig. 115.—Group of Wood Cells _w_, showing their shape
and the small soft-walled cells at the angles between them _p_]
Petrified material of leaves and roots is rare, and both are chiefly
known through the work of the French palæobotanist Renault. The leaves
are chiefly remarkable for the bands of sclerized strengthening tissue,
and generally had the structure of aerial, not submerged leaves. The
roots were simple in structure, and, as in _Calamites_, had secondary
tissue like that in the stems.
In the case of the fructifications it is the English material which has
yielded the most illuminating specimens. The cones were long and slender,
externally covered by the closely packed tips of the scales, which
overlapped deeply. Between the whorls of scales lay the sporangia,
attached to their upper sides by slender stalks. A diagram will best
explain how they were arranged (see fig. 116). Two sporangia were
attached to each bract, but their stalks were of different lengths, so
that one sporangium lay near the axis and one lay outside it toward the
tip of the bract.
[Illustration: Fig. 116.—Diagram of Arrangement of Scales and Sporangia
in Cones of _Sphenophyllum_
A, Axis; _br_, bract; S, sporangium, with stalk _st_.]
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