THE FORESTS OF LONG AGO 41 



the rapidity of our glimpse somewhat as if a motion picture 

 were speeded up before our eyes. Actually these changes were 

 often no more rapid than the changes going on today. 



In all this study of the remote past one is able to look back 

 through the years into the earlier days of the world because 

 of the rocks that preserve for us remnants of leaves, seeds, 

 twigs, and sometimes whole trees, that have been lifeless now 

 for millions of years. These remnants of tree life give us a 

 more or less continuous picture, although here and there wide 

 breaks exist. It is a little like reading a book from which some- 

 times pages and sometimes whole chapters have been torn. 



These rocks begin their story for us back at the earliest traces 

 of living things for the plant is the oldest form of life. Millions 

 of years before the first tree existed, long before man walked 

 the earth, or any land animal lived, the rocks show us that 

 early forms of plant life were in existence. Some are remote 

 but recognizable ancestors of trees and among them are the 

 great club mosses and the early fern-like plants. 



From these forms of life, from the tree ferns and cycads 

 came the early trees. First the conifers the cone-bearing trees 

 gradually developed and became the world's most important 

 type of vegetation. These ancestors of our present pines and 

 spruces are of enormous antiquity and are present in the oldest 

 rocks in which any of the land plants have been preserved to 

 us. Gradually these cone bearers spread over the world. Men 

 speak today of that era as the "Age of Conifers," for during 

 that time the world possessed a greater abundance and variety 

 of conifers than has ever existed before or since. For ages they 

 held sovereignty over the world of plants and at the end of this 

 era came the beginning of the modern forest trees. 



