INTRODUCTION. 5 



dimensions, and rank luxuriance, covered the whole earth 

 with a closely- woven mantle of dark green verdure from 

 Melville Island in the extreme north to the islands of 

 the Antarctic Ocean in the extreme south. The relics of 

 these immense primeval forests, reduced to a carbona- 

 ceous or bituminous condition by the secret resources 

 of nature's laboratory, amidst so many convulsions of 

 the globe, are now buried deep in the bowels of the 

 earth, packed into solid sandstone cases, and under huge 

 shady covers, and stored up in the smallest compass by 

 the mighty pressure of ponderous rock-presses, constitut- 

 ing the chief source of our domestic comfort, and of 

 nearly all our commercial greatness. A coal-bed is, in 

 fact, a Iwrtus siccus of extinct cryptogamic vegetation, 

 bringing before the imagination a vista of the ancient 

 world, with which no arrangement of landscape or com- 

 bination of scenery can now be compared ; and gazing upon 

 its dusky contents, our minds are baffled in aiming to 

 comprehend the bulk of original material, the seasons of 

 successive growth, and the immeasurable years or ages 

 which passed while decay, and maceration, and chemical 

 changes prepared the fallen vegetation for fuel. If the 

 specimens of plants thus strangely preserved, teach us 

 one truth more than another, it is this, that size and 

 development are terms of no meaning when applied to 

 a low or a high type of organization. The cryptogamia 

 of the old world, the earliest planting in the new-formed 

 soil, are in bulk, as well as in elegance and beauty of 

 form, unrivalled by the finest specimens of the modern 

 forest. The little and the great, the recent and the 

 extinct, were equally the objects of nature's care, and 



