exhibits no fewer than seven of those
round, beautifully sculptured scars, ranged rectilinearly along the
trunk, by which this ancient genus is so remarkably characterized. It
is covered with small, sharply relieved, obovate scales, most of them
furnished with an apparent midrib, and with their edges slightly turned
up; from which peculiarities, and their great beauty, they seem suited
to remind the architect of that style of sculpture adopted by Palladio
from his master Vitruvius, when, in ornamenting the Corinthian and
composite torus, lie fretted it into closely imbricated obovate leaves.
These scales are ranged in elegant curves, not unlike those ornamental
curves,--a feat of the turning-lathe,--which one sees roughening the
backs of ladies' watches of French manufacture. My fossil exhibited, as
it lay in the rock, what I never saw in any other specimen,--a true
branch sticking out at an acute angle from the stem, and fretted with
scales of a peculiar form, which in one little corner appear also on the
main stem, but which differ so considerably from those of the obovate,
apparently imbricated type, that, if found on a separate specimen, they
might be held to indicate difference of species. It has been shown by
Messrs. Lindley and Hutton, on the evidence of one of the specimens
figured in the "Fossil Flora," that the line of circular scars so
remarkable in this genus, and which is held to be the impressions made
by a rectilinear range of almost sessile cones, existed in duplicate on
each stem,--a row occurring on two of the sides of the plant directly
opposite each other. The branch in my specimen struck off from one of
the intermediate sides at right angles with the cones. We already know
that these were ranged in one plane; nor, if the branches were ranged in
one plane also,--certainly the disposition of branch which would consort
best with such a disposition of cone,--would the arrangement be without
example in the vegetable kingdom as it even now exists. "Our host," says
the late Captain Basil Hall, in his brief description of the island of
Java, "carried us to see a singular tree, which had been brought from
Madagascar, called familiarly the _Traveller's Friend_, Urania being, I
believe, its botanic name. We found it to differ from most other trees
in having all its branches in one plane, like the sticks of a fan or the
feathers of a peacock's tail." I may further mention, that the specimen
which showed me the ab