66 SEASIDE DIVINITY. 



zone. Many of them were from thirty, forty, and 

 sixty feet in height. The leaves of this tribe of 

 plants exhibit great elegance and variety of forms, 

 and are pictured with wonderful accuracy and 

 minuteness in the coal shale. Besides the tree- 

 ferns there were Lepidodendra,or arborescent club- 

 mosses of gigantic dimensions, attaining an altitude 

 of sixty or seventy feet. These cryptogamic plants 

 grew with extreme rapidity and luxuriance in the 

 hot and moist atmosphere of the period to which 

 they belonged, and formed in the mode explained 

 by geologists those immense deposits of coal which 

 belong to the formation now in question. 



The animal remains must now be referred to. 

 The Zoophytes and Mollusca exhibit numerous 

 corals and crinoideans, shells of great varieties of 

 form occurring in the limestone strata of the 

 formation. Among the Crustaceans of this period 

 are animals which are referred to the Limulus or 

 king-crab, a genus abundant at present in the 

 Indian seas. We also discover vestiges of the 

 trilobites which belong, as we have seen, to the 

 Silurian waters, but which had become extinct 

 long antecedent to the Carboniferous era. The 

 fossil remains of insects, including various kinds 

 of beetles ; fossil scorpions and various fishes, many 

 of them of great magnitude, and some related to 

 lizards in character and form, others to the shark 

 family, and many of them possessed of finely 

 enamelled scales, and having their heads protected 

 "by strong and smooth plates of enamel. 



IV. The Permian Formation now remains to be 

 noticed as belonging to the Palaeozoic system. This 



