326 Ancient Vegeiation of the Earth. 
Conifere. The existence of these two families, during this pe- 
riod, is of high importance as signalizing an intimate relation 
between them, by their organization ; and they form the inter- 
mediate link between the vascular Cryptogamia, which composed, 
almost alone, the primitive vegetation of the coal period, and the 
phanerogamick Dicotyledons, strictly speaking, which constituted 
a majority of the vegetable kingdom, during the tertiary period. 
Thus, to the vascular Cryptogamia, the first degree of ligneous 
vegetation, succeeded the Coniferse and the Cycadee, which held 
arank more elevated in the vegetable scale ; and to these last 
succeeded the dicotyledonous plants, which occupy the summit 
of that scale. 
In the — kingdom, as in the animal, there has pase 
then, a gradual improvement in the organization of the beings 
which have cana: existed upon our earth, from the first 
which appeared upon its surface even to those that inhabit it at 
the present day. 
The tertiary period, during which were deposited those earths 
that now form the soil of the principal capitals of Europe, as 
London, Paris, and Vienna, witnessed transformations, in the or- 
ganick world, greater than any of those which had taken place 
since the destruction of the primitive vegetation. 
In the animal kingdom: the creation of mammifers,(3) a class 
swhich all naturalists concur in placing at the summit of the ani- 
mal scale, and by which nature seems to have preluded the crea- 
tion of man; in the vegetable kingdom, the creation of the 
Riis iedois, a grand division which, by unanimous consent, bot- 
anists have always placed at the head, of this kingdom, and which, 
by the variety of its forms and organization, by the magnitude 
of its leaves and the beauty of its flowers and its fruits, must, of 
necessity, have imprinted upon vegetation an aspect very different 
from that which it had offered through all previous periods. 
This class of Dicotyledons, of which we are scarcely able to 
cite any indications at the close of the secondary, presented itself, 
errs 
(3) In placing the first appearance of mammifers at the epoch of the tertiary 
formation, I do not include the fact, unequalled elsewhere, of the fossil mam- 
mifers of Stonesfield ; a case which forms an exception to all former experience, 
= which cannot be detailed in so limited an essay.—Author’s note. 
or drawings and brief descriptions of these fossils, which occurred in oolites 
= bE sane ay American edition, Vol. I. pp. 154-5.— Translator 
