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Nothing but a metallic lode, whose innumerable windings through the bowels of the soil should be connected subterraneously at the base of the block. It seemed to me also that the place of this block ought to be in the magnetic axis, as a sort of gigantic calamite, from whence the imponderable fluid whose currents made an inexhaustible accumulator set up at the confines of the world should issue.
In the nature of their stems, too, they exhibited a more highly organised arrangement than their living representatives, having, according to Dr Williamson, a "fistular pith, an exogenous woody stem, and a thick smooth bark." The bark having almost al ways disappeared has left the fluted stem known to us as the calamite.
The opinion of M. Brongniart that the Lepidostrobus is the fruit of Lepidodendron has been confirmed, for these strobili or fruits have been found terminating the tip of a branch of a well-characterised Lepidodendron in Coalbrook Dale and elsewhere. Calamites Sucowii, Brong.; natural size. Radical termination of a Calamite.
Williamson said that what had formerly been regarded as such had turned out to be only casts in sand and mud of the pith of the true plant. He had lately obtained a specimen of calamite with the bark on which showed a nucleal cellular pith, surrounded by canals running lengthwise down the stem; outside of these canals wedges of true vascular structure; and lastly, a cellular bark.
Some prepare the secundine thus: Take the navel-string and dry it in an oven, take two drachms of the powder, cinnamon a drachm, saffron half a scruple, with the juice of savin make trochisks; give two drachms; or wash the secundine in wine and bake it in a pot; then wash it in endive water and wine, take half a drachm of it; long pepper, galangal, of each half a drachm; plantain and endive seed, of each half a drachm; lavender seed, four scruples; make a powder, or take laudanum, two drachms; storax, calamite, benzoin, of each half a drachm; musk, ambergris each six grains, make a powder or trochisks for a fume.
The foliage is arranged in whorls around the joints, and, unlike its fossil representatives, its joints are protected by striated sheaths. The stem of the largest living species rarely exceeds half-an-inch in diameter, whilst that of the calamite attained a thickness of five inches.
Occasionally some of the calamite brakes and forests of Sigillariae and Coniferae were exposed in the flood season, or sometimes, perhaps, by slight elevatory movements to the denuding action of the river or the sea.
The foliage consisted of whorls of long narrow leaves, which differed only from the fern asterophyllites in the fact that they were single-nerved. Sir William Dawson assigns the calamites to four sub-types: calamite proper, calamopitus, calamodendron, and eucalamodendron. Root of Catamites Suckowii. Calamocladus grandis.
Carruthers believes that they grew inside the base of the leaves, as they do in the quillwort, a small plant which grows at the bottom of our mountain lakes. That stem is very important, for it belonged to a plant called a Calamite, which, as we shall see presently, helped to sift the earth away from the coal and keep it pure.
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