Descriptive Catalogue of the Fossil Organic Remains of Plants Contained in the Museum ...

Front Cover
 

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 60 - Cellular flowerless plants, nourished through their whole surface by the medium in which they vegetate ; living in air; propagated by spores usually enclosed in asci, and always having green gonidia in their thallus.
Page 51 - Sphenopteris. Leaves bi-tripinnatifid ; leaflets contracted at the base, not adherent to the rachis, lobed ; the lower lobes largest, diverging, somewhat palmate ; veins bipinnate, radiating as it were from the base.
Page 52 - Neuropteris. Leaves bipinnate, or rarely pinnate ; leaflets usually somewhat cordate at the base, neither adhering to each other nor to the rachis, by their whole base, only by the middle portion of it ; midrib vanishing at the apex ; veins oblique, curved, very fine, dichotomous — Fructification ; sori lanceolate, even (covered with an indusium), arising from the veins of the apex of the leaflets, and often placed in the bifurcations.
Page 56 - Pecopteris*. Leaf once, twice, or thrice pinnate : leaflets adhering by their base to the rachis, or occasionally distinct : midrib running quite through the leaflets ; veins almost perpendicular to the midrib, simple, or once or twice dichotomous.
Page 50 - Petioles, or leaf stalks, have fallen off. Upon the former of these characters M. Ad. Brongniart has chiefly founded his classification of fossil Ferns, it being impossible to apply to them the system adopted in the arrangement of living Genera, founded on the varied disposition of the fructification, which is rarely preserved in a fossil state. ' 3. Those which grow within 30 or 35 degrees on each side of the Equator, 1200 species. If we compare the amount of Ferns with the united numbers of other...
Page 50 - Botanically regarded, the ferns are the most numerous of vascular cryptogamic plants, and they are distinguished from all other vegetables by the peculiar division and distribution of the veins of the leaves, and, in...
Page 80 - Insects, spiders, small crustaceans, leaves, and fragments of vegetable tissue, arc imbedded in some of the masses. Upwards of 800 species of insects have been observed ; most of them belong to species, and even genera, that appear to be distinct from any now known, but others...
Page 55 - Leaves bipianated ; leaflet, membranous, very thin, adhering by all their base to the rachis, with no, or almost no midrib ; veins equal, simple, or forked, very fine, most of them springing from the rachis.
Page 52 - Leaves simple, entire, and somewhat orbicular; veins numerous, radiating from the base, dichotomous, equal ; midrib wanting.

Bibliographic information