10 Reflections an Primitive Vegetation. 



remarkable in the history of the vegetable kingdom, for the 

 preponderance of two families, which are lost, as it were, in 

 the midst of the immense variety of vegetable forms, with 

 which the surface of the earth is at this time covered, but 

 which then predominated above all the rest, both in number 

 and size. These are the Coniferw, of which the fir, the pine, 

 the yew, and the cypress, furnish well-known examples ; and 

 the Cycadece, which are plants altogether exotic, less nume- 

 rous in our present world, than in that remote period, and 

 which join to the foliage and height of the palm, the essen- 

 tial structure of coniferous plants. The existence of these 

 two families during this period, is so much the more worthy 

 of attention, because being connected with each other by their 

 organization, they form the intermediate link between the 

 vascular Cryptogamia which almost solely formed the primi- 

 tive vegetation of the coal period, and the phanerogamous 

 Dicotyledones, properly so called, which formed the greater 

 part of the vegetable kingdom, during the tertiary period. 



Thus, the vascular Cryptogamia, the first step of ligneous 

 organization, are succeeded by the Conifera and the Cyca- 

 dece, which hold a more elevated rank in the scale of vegeta- 

 tion; and these again are succeeded by the dicotyledonous 

 plants, which occupy its summit. 



Thus in the vegetable as well as in the animal kingdom, 

 there has been a gradual advance towards perfection, in the 

 organization of the beings, which have successively lived up- 

 on our globe ; — from those which first appeared upon its sur- 

 face, to those by which it is now inhabited. 



The tertiary period, during which were deposited the stra- 

 ta on which rest the foundations of the greatest capitals of 

 Europe, as London, Paris, and Vienna, witnessed the opera- 

 ration of greater changes in the organic world, than any that 

 have been effected since the destruction of the primeval vege- 

 tation. In the animal kingdom, the creation of Mammifera,* 

 a class which all naturalists agree in placing at the top of the 

 scale of animated beings, and which seems to have been form- 

 ed as a prelude to the creation of man. In the vegetable 

 kingdom, the creation of Dicotyledones, the great division 

 which the unanimous consent of botanists has always placed 

 at the head of this kingdom ; and which, by the variety of its 

 forms, and its organization, by the size of its leaves, and the 

 beauty of its flowers and fruit, must have stamped upon the 



*In referring the creation of the Mammiferous class to the tertiary epoch, 

 I omit the hitherto unique occurrence of the fossil Mammifer in the Stones- 

 field slate : this is quite an exceptionable fact, and would he altogether out 

 of place in a short sketch, like the present. 



