108 THE HISTORY OF CREATION. 
the scale-trees, but differ from them and from ferns in 
general in many ways. They were possibly closely related 
to the extinct Devonian Lycopteridewe, combining character- 
istic peculiarities of the club-mosses and the frondose ferns, 
which Strasburger considers as the hypothetical primary 
form of flowering plants. 
In leaving the dense forests of the primary period, which 
were principally composed of frond ferns (Lepidodendreze 
and Sigillarieze), we pass onwards to the no less character- 
istic pine forests of the secondary period. Thus we leave 
the domain of the Cryptogamia, the plants forming neither 
flowers nor seeds, and enter the second main division of the 
vegetable kingdom, namely, the sub-kingdom of the Phanero- 
gamia, flowering plants forming seeds. This division, so rich 
in forms, containing the principal portion of the present 
vegetable world, and especially the majority of plants living 
on land, is certainly of a much more recent date than the 
division of Cryptogamia. For it can have developed out 
of the latter only in the course of the palzeolithic period. 
We can with full assurance maintain that, during the whole 
archilithic period, hence during the first and longer half of 
the organic history of the earth, no flowering plants as yet 
existed, and that they first developed during the primary 
period out of Cryptogamia of the fern kind. The anatomical 
and embryological relation of Phanerogamia to the latter 
is so close, that from it we can with certainty infer their 
genealogical connection, that is, their true blood relation- 
ship. Flowering plants cannot have directly arisen out of 
thallus plants, nor out of mosses; but only out of ferns, or 
Filicines. Most probably the scaled ferns, or Lepidophyta, 
and more especially amongst these the Lycopodiacez, forms 
