Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 May 2009
The genus Halonia was established in the Fossil Flora (vol. ii., p. 13) by Lindley and Hutton for those fossils in which, to the surface of Lepidodendron, is added the mode of branching of certain Coniferœ, and which were therefore inferred to be of a nature analogous to the latter. It was assumed that Lepidodendron, being an extinct form of Lycopodiaceœ, must be limited to the fossils in which the branching was dichotomous, since no other kind of branching is met with in recent Lycopodiaceœ. But when we look at such plants as Lycopodium cernuum and L. densum, we find branching precisely similar to that in Halonia gracilis, L. and H.; and whether these were produced or not by the division of a terminal bud, it is certain that in their developed condition they are arranged in an alternate manner round a common elongated axis— a plan of branching characteristic, as the authors of the Fossil Flora supposed, of Coniferœ.
page 146 note 1 See Memoir on Ulodendron, Monthly Microscopical Journal, March, 1870.
page 146 note 2 See Geol. Mag., March, 1873, p. 107.
page 147 note 1 Goldenberg overlooked Lindley and Hutton's earlier use of this name for a fragmentary fossil, which I have shown to be the part of a Calamite stem. See Woodward's “British Fossil Crustacea of the Order Merostomata,” part iv., p. 168, Pal. Soc. vol xxvi. 1872.
page 148 note 1 Prepared sections of Halonia in the British Museum confirm the observations Mr. Dawes.
page 148 note 2 Journal of Botany, vol. vii. (1869), p. 153, plate 93.