256 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 
what may be either large spikes or catkins. What strange 
forms of vegetable life appear in the forest behind! Can 
that be a club-moss that raises its slender height for more 
than fifty feet from the soil? Or can these tall, palm-like 
trees be actually ferns, and these spreading branches mere 
fronds? And then these gigantic reeds!—are they not 
mere varieties of the common horse-tail of our bogs and mo- 
tasses, magnified some sixty or a hundred times? Have we 
arrived at some such country as the continent visited by Gulli- 
ver, in which he found thickets of weeds and grass tall as woods 
of twenty years’ growth, and lost himself amid a forest of 
corn, fifty feet in height? The lesser vegetation of our own 
country, reeds, mosses, and ferns, seems here as. if viewed 
through a microscope: the dwarfs have sprung up into giants, 
and yet there appears to be no proportional increase in size 
among what are unequivocally its trees. Yonder is a group 
of what seem to be pines—tall and bulky, ’tis true, but 
neither taller nor bulkier than the pines of Norway and 
America; and the club-moss behind shoots up its green, 
hairy arms, loaded with what seems catkins above their top- 
most cones. But what monster of the vegetable world comes 
floating down the stream — now circling round in the eddies, 
now dancing on the ripple, now shooting down the rapid? It 
resembles a gigantic star-fish, or an immense coach-wheel, 
divested of the rim. There is a green, dome-like mass in the 
centre, that corresponds to the nave of the wheel, or the 
body of the star-fish ; and the boughs shoot out horizontally 
on every side, like spokes from the nave, or rays from the 
central body. The diameter considerably exceeds forty feet ; 
the branches, originally of a deep green, are assuming the 
golden tinge of decay; the cylindrical and hollow leaves 
stand out thick on every side, like prickles of the wild rose on 
the red, fleshy, lance-like shoots of a year’s growth, that will 
