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Palms are so like cycads that we may regard them as the descendants of some cycad type. In the UPPER CRETACEOUS, cycads become rare. The highest types of flowering plants gain a complete ascendency, and forests of modern aspect cover the continent from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean.
It was one of the smaller members of that terrible family of carnivorous dinosaurians which ruled the ancient cycad forests as the black-maned lion rules the Rhodesian jungles to-day. The massive iguanodon which fled before it so madly, though of fully thrice its bulk, had reason to fear it as the fat cow fears a wolf.
The seed-bearing trees, the thin, needle-leafed trees, the trees with stronger texture of the wood, are slowly singled out by the deepening cold. The golden age of Cryptogams is over. The age of the Cycad and the Conifers is opening.
The tawny slime defeated irresolute efforts, and my slipping hands bestowed a baptismal splash. Instantly I became conscious of a strange presence, and, glancing over my shoulder, saw an unfamiliar black boy lurking behind a glistening-fronded Cycad. The whole scene had undergone wishful transformation.
The Cycad under which the boy crouched was slim-shaped, and its foliage resembled that of one of the most beautiful of ferns, with languorous, dolorous fronds, while it was crowned with a huge fruit of golden-brown. All the scene had been wondrously transfigured. Time's treacheries had been defeated. A garden-like age had been restored.
The trees are conifers, cycads, and trees akin to the ginkgo, or Maidenhair Tree, of modern Japan. The broad, fan-like leaves and plum-like fruit of the ginkgoales, of which the temple-gardens of Japan have religiously preserved a solitary descendant, are found in the most distant regions. But the most frequent and characteristic tree of the Jurassic landscape is the cycad.
She will in time be able to recognise at a glance the particular kind of decayed timber in which the delicious white grub resides, will know that the nut of the cycad has to be immersed in a running stream before it is "good fella," and how to grind the kernel into flour, and how to mould the dough into a German sausage-shaped damper; she will be able to walk about the reef, picking up blacklip oysters and clams, without lacerating the soles of her feet, and to make a dilly-bag, and, finally, to enjoy a smoke.
The most reasonable view seems to be that a small and local branch of these primitive flowering plants was evolved, like the rest, in the stress of the Permian-Triassic cold; that, instead of descending to the warm moist levels with the rest at the end of the Triassic, and developing the definite characters of the cycad, it remained on the higher and cooler land; and that the rise of land at the end of the Jurassic period stimulated the development of its Angiosperm features, enlarged the area in which it was especially fitted to thrive, and so permitted it to spread and suddenly break into the geological record as a fully developed Angiosperm.
Here, too, are the mango, and many sorts of bananas, and the cabbage palm, another favorite resource of starving adventurers. With these there are other jungle denizens, the bamboo palm, the paperleaf palm, splendid specimens of the world-old cycad family, the guanabana, and a Tom Thumb palm, which, full grown, is no more than a handbreadth high.
On adjacent flats and slopes grow survivals from one of the most ancient of all plants a Cycad, that botanical paradox, combining some of the characteristics of the lie palm and of the pine with the appearance of a tree-fern, while being of distinctive order, which flourished during the age when the Iguanodon and the Polacanthus and other monstrous and ungainly reptiles roamed the land.
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