The cycads--the botanist would say Cycadophyta or Cycadales, to mark them off from the cycads of modern times--formed a third of the whole Jurassic vegetation, while to-day they number only about a hundred species in 180,000, and are confined to warm latitudes. All over the earth, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, their palm-like foliage showered from the top of their generally short stems in the Jurassic. But the most interesting point about them is that a very large branch of them (the Bennettiteae) went far beyond the modern Gymnosperm in their flowers and fruit, and approached the Angiosperms. Their fructifications "rivalled the largest flowers of the present day in structure and modelling" (Scott), and possibly already gave spots of sober colour to the monotonous primitive landscape. On the other hand, they approached the ferns so much more closely than modern cycads do that it is often impossible to say whether Jurassic remains must be classed as ferns or cycads. We have here, therefore, a most interesting evolutionary group. The botanist finds even more difficulty than the zoologist in drawing up the pedigrees of his plants, but the general features of the larger groups which he finds in succession in the chronicle of the earth point very decisively to evolution. The seed-bearing ferns of the Coal-forest point upward to the later stage, and downward to a common origin with the ordinary spore-bearing ferns. Some of them are "altogether of a cycadean type" (Scott) in respect of the seed. On the other hand, the Bennettiteae of the Jurassic have the mixed characters of ferns, cycads, and flowering plants, and thus, in their turn, point downward to a lower ancestry and upward to the next great stage in plant-development. It is not suggested that the seed-ferns we know evolved into the cycads we know, and these in turn into our flowering plants. It is enough for the student of evolution to see in them so many stages in the evolution of plants up to the Angiosperm level. The gaps between the various groups are less rigid than scientific men used to think. Taller than the cycads, firmer in the structure of the wood, and destined to survive in thousands of species when the cycads would be reduced to a hundred, were the pines and yews and other conifers of the Jurassic landscape. We saw them first appearing, in the stunted Walchias and Voltzias, during the severe conditions of the Permian period. Like the birds and mammals they await the coming of a fresh period of cold to give them a decided superiority over the cycads. Botanists look for their ancestors in some form related to the Cordaites of the Coal-forest. The ginkgo trees seem to be even more closely related to the Cordaites, and evolved from an early and generalised branch of that group. The Cordaites, we may recall, more or less united in one tree the characters of the conifer (in their wood) and the cycad (in their fruit).