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If, on the other hand, the endosperm is the product of an act of fertilization as definite as that giving rise to the embryo itself, we have to recognize that twin-plants are produced within the embryo-sac one, the embryo, which becomes the angiospermous plant, the other, the endosperm, a short-lived, undifferentiated nurse to assist in the nutrition of the former, even as the subsidiary embryos in a pluri-embryonic Gymnosperm may facilitate the nutrition of the dominant one.
Phanerogamic plants in their lowest groups of gymnosperm exogens then begin to appear in the Devonian conifers, gradually followed by cycads. And it is not till Cainozoic times that we have the endogenous grasses and palms and angiospermous exogens.
It is a remarkable fact, as he justly observes, that the angiospermous exogens, which comprise four-fifths of living plants a division to which all our native European trees, except the Coniferae, belong, and which embrace all the Compositae, Leguminosae, Umbelliferae, Cruciferae, Heaths, and so many other families are wholly unrepresented by any fossils hitherto discovered in the Primary and Secondary formations from the Silurian to the Oolitic inclusive.
There is no doubt that the phylum of Angiosperms has not sprung from that of Gymnosperms. Within each class the flower-characters as the essential feature of Angiosperms supply the clue to phylogeny, but the uncertainty regarding the construction of the primitive angiospermous flower gives a fundamental point of divergence in attempts to construct progressive sequences of the families.
I must refrain from all enumeration of the angiospermous or ordinary deciduous trees and shrubs, which are now known, by their fossil remains, to have flourished throughout the polar regions when Greenland better deserved its name and enjoyed the present climate of New England and New Jersey.
Thus if the rise of the Angiospermous vegetation on the ruins of the Mesozoic world is understood in the light of geological and climatic changes, and the consequent deploying of the insects, especially the suctorial insects, is a natural result, the simultaneous triumph of the birds is not unintelligible.
Although the Mesozoic era is shorter than the Paleozoic, as measured by the thickness of their strata, yet its duration must be reckoned in millions of years. Its predominant life features are the culmination and the beginning of the decline of reptiles, amphibians, cephalopod mollusks, and cycads, and the advent of marsupial mammals, birds, teleost fishes, and angiospermous plants.
It is assumed that the spreading world of the Angiospermous plants somewhere met the spread of the advancing mammals, and opened out a rich new granary to them. This led to so powerful a development of the mammals that they succeeded in overthrowing the reptiles. There are several serious difficulties in the way of this theory.
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