American Fossil Cycads (Classic Reprint)

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Excerpt from American Fossil Cycads The investigations here recorded were begun in the field in 1898. During the summer of that year, while collecting Testudinata in the "Bad Lands" of the Cheyenne River and Dinosauria in the nearby Rim of the Eastern Black Hills, I had many opportunities for visiting and carefully examining the famous Black Hawk cycad locality, to which my attention had been previously directed by Professor Marsh, when the season's work was planned. It was, too, during the fall of 1898 that, as is more fully related in the fourth chapter, I had the good fortune to discover, well to the north of the old Black Hawk locality and to the east of Piedmont, the fossil cycad bearing the most perfectly silicified prefoliate fronds of any yet obtained. Soon after this discovery, furthermore, Professor Lester F. Ward, whom I then met for the first time, revisited the Piedmont-Black Hawk region. Thus I found myself in touch with the two men of all others in this country most interested in the fossil cycads - the one primarily in securing a great and representative collection, the other in making these peculiarly interesting and problematic forms accessible to the further study so urgently required, and I returned to New Haven with the fixed intention of attempting a complete elaboration of the structure of the Mesozoic cycads as soon as might prove feasible. The necessity for the proposed series of thin sections was fully appreciated by Professor Marsh, and it was particularly pleasing to me that he was able to take part in the discovery of the staminate disk and foliage which was made shortly thereafter. The subsequent course of these studies is of lesser moment in this connection. As I have made all of the sections and most of the photographs and photomicrographs, it is evident that the labor involved has been arduous, however replete with interest. With respect to the mode of presentation of relationships in the two closing chapters, it may be said that the form adopted appeared the most practical in the present status of laboratory study of the existing cycads, and field and laboratory study of the fossil cycads. I am keenly aware that the conclusions reached therein can be at the best but tentative ones, and that, above all, the paleontologic record must be laboriously scanned afield for many years before mere hypothesis can be thrust aside for the clear and established truth. But it can not be doubted that it is fully possible to accomplish a final and satisfactory solution of the still largely obscure and hidden phases of homoplasy and parallelism involved in the origin of cycadaceous plants, the fuller knowledge of which is so centrally fundamental to an empiric conception of gymnosperm and perhaps even angiosperin evolution. In taking up the study of the cycads at the point of relative urgency, and following the initial macroscopic descriptions by Ward, it has not been thought either necessary, or in any sense a convenient method, to attempt to deal, in this volume, with any of the minor questions of classification and nomenclature. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.