Ancient Vegetation of the Barth. — -  9oR 
diacew, the Ferns and the Equiseta of gigantick growth ; which 
Was an essential characteristick of -this primitive creation.(2) 
After the destruction of this primitive vegetation, the vegetable 
kingdom appears for a long period not to have attained the same 
degree of development. Indeed, in the numerous layers of se- 
condary earths which succeed the coal formations we scarcely 
ever find those masses of vegetable imprints, a species of natural 
herbariums, which, in these ancient depots of carbon attest to us 
the simultaneous existence of a prodigious number of plants. 
Scarcely in any part of these formations do we meet with thick 
layers of fossil combustibles; and never are such layers often 
repeated, or found of such cet extent as in the coal deposits. 
Hither the vegetable kingdom at this period occupied more cir- 
eumscribed portions of the surface of the earth, or its scattered 
individuals covered but incompletely a soil of little fertility, and 
of which the revolutions of the globe had not permitted them to 
become tranquil possessors; or, finally, the condition of the sur- 
face of the earth was not favourable to the preservation of the 
vegetables which then inhabited it 
Yet that long period which sereratend the coal from the tertiary 
formations, a period that was the theatre of so many physical 
revolutions of the globe, and which witnessed the appearance, in 
the waters of the deep, of gigantick reptiles, types of the fantas- 
tical organizations in which we may suppose we often recognize 
those monsters born of the imaginations of the poets of antiquity ; 
this period, I say, is remarkable in the history of the vegetable 
kingdom, by the preponderance of two families which are lost, 
so to speak, in the midst of the immense variety of aunbiniles 
with which the surface of the earth is covered, at the present 
day, but which then predominated over all the others, by their 
number and their magnitude. These are the Conifere, of which 
the Fir, Pine, Yew and Cypress furnish well known examples ; 
and the Cycadee, vegetables wholly exotick, less numerous at 
the present day than at this ancient period, and which joined to 
the leaves and mien of the Palms, the essential structure of the 
(2) We find, it is true, in some parts of the secondary formations, a small num- 
less considerable than those of the coal formations ; nor do we discover, there, any 
trace of the arborescent Lycopodiacee analogous to the Lepidodendrons,—4u- 
thor’s note. 
