the Mesozoic, which
we may conceive as evolved from one or other branch of the mixed
Carboniferous vegetation. We next find that the Mesozoic is by no means
purely an age of Gymnosperms. I do not mean merely that the Angiosperms
appear in force before its close, and were probably evolved much
earlier. The fact is that the Gymnosperms of the Mesozoic are often of
a curiously mixed character, and well illustrate the transition to the
Angiosperms, though they may not be their actual ancestors. This will be
clearer if we glance in succession at the various types of plant which
adorned and enriched the Jurassic world.

The European or American landscape--indeed, the aspect of the earth
generally, for there are no pronounced zones of climate--is still
utterly different from any that we know to-day. No grass carpets the
plains; none of the flowers or trees with which we are familiar, except
conifers, are found in any region. Ferns grow in great abundance,
and have now reached many of the forms with which we are acquainted.
Thickets of bracken spread over the plains; clumps of Royal ferns and
Hartstongues spring up in moister parts. The trees are conifers, cycads,
and trees akin to the ginkgo, or Maidenhair Tree, of modern Japan.
Cypresses, yews, firs, and araucarias (the Monkey Puzzle group) grow
everywhere, though the species are more primitive than those of today.
The broad, fan-like leaves and plum-like fruit of the ginkgoales, of
which the temple-gardens of Japan have religiously preserved a solitary
descendant, are found in the most distant regions. But the most frequent
and characteristic tree of the Jurassic landscape is the cycad.

The cycads--the botanist would say Cycadophyta or Cycadales, to mark
them off from the cycads of modern times--formed a third of the whole
Jurassic vegetation, while to-day they number only about a hundred
species in 180,000, and are confined to warm latitudes. All over
the earth, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, their palm-like foliage
showered from the top of their generally short stems in the Jurassic.
But the most interesting point about them is that a very large branch of
them (the Bennettiteae) went far beyond the modern Gymnosperm in their
flowers and fruit, and approached the Angiosperms. Their fructifications
"rivalled the largest flowers of the present day in structure and
modelling" (Scott), and possibly already gave spots of sober colour to
the monotonous primitive landscape.