Nat.

tome 5 page 216.) The analogy between the male and female organs in Coniferae, the existence of an open ovarium being assumed, is at first sight more apparent than in Cycadeae.

In Coniferae, however, the pollen is certainly not naked, but is enclosed in a membrane similar to the lobe of an ordinary anthera.

And in those genera in which each squama of the amentum produces two marginal lobes only, as Pinus, Podocarpus, Dacrydium, Salisburia, and Phyllocladus, it nearly resembles the more general form of the antherae in other Phaenogamous plants.

But the difficulty occurs in those genera which have an increased number of lobes on each squama, as Agathis and Araucaria, where their number is considerable and apparently indefinite, and more particularly still in Cunninghamia, or Belis,* in which the lobes, though only three in number, agree in this respect, as well as in insertion and direction, with the ovula.