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The Lepidodendron, its fellow monarch of the forest, branched at the summit, and terminated in clusters of its stiff, needle-like leaves, six' or seven inches long, like enormous exaggerations of the little cones at the ends of our Club-mosses to-day.
Even if we make some reduction on the ground of varieties which have been mistaken, in the absence of their fructification, for species, still the result is singular, because the whole of Europe affords at present no more than sixty-seven indigenous species. Lepidodendron Sternbergii. Coal-measures, near Newcastle. Branching trunk, 49 feet long, supposed to have belonged to L. Sternbergii.
I have come to a halt, and leaning in some doorway, gazed in awestruck wonder at the nodding foliage of a leviathan lepidodendron, the phantasm of one of those mammoth lycopods that flourished in the Carboniferous period.
This, therefore, would seem to shew the affinity of the sigillaria to the lepidodendron, and through it to the living lycopods, or club-mosses. Some few species of stigmarian roots had been discovered, and various specific names had been given to them before their actual nature was made out.
Lepidodendron. There is but one more form of carbon with which we have to deal in running through the series. We have seen that coal is not the summum bonum of the series. Other transformations take place after the stage of coal is reached, which, by the continued disentanglement of gases, finally bring about the plumbago stage.
The lepidodendra bore linear one-nerved leaves, and the stems always branched dichotomously and possessed a central pith. Specimens variously named knorria, lepidophloios, halonia, and ulodendron are all referable to this family. Lepidodendron longifolium.
Anodonta Jukesii, Forbes. Bifurcating branch of Lepidodendron Griffithsii, Brongn. Palaeopteris Hibernica, Schimp.
But, in their essential structure, they very closely resemble the earliest Lepidodendroid trees of the coal: their stems and leaves are similar; so are their cones; and no less like are the sporangia and spores; while even in their size, the spores of the Lepidodendron and those of the existing Lycopodium, or club-moss, very closely approach one another.
If one of these submarine forest beds should be gradually depressed and covered up by new deposits, it would present just the same characters as an under-clay of the coal, if the Sigillaria and Lepidodendron of the ancient world were substituted for the oak, or the beech, of our own times.
The specimens found in the muschelkalk are allied to the crocodile and lizard tribes of the present day, but in the latter instance are upon a scale of magnitude as much superior to present forms as the lepidodendron of the coal era was superior to the dwarf club-mosses of our time. These saurians also combine some peculiarities of structure of a most extraordinary character.
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