40) THE PRESENT. 



kingdom. And it is curious to learn that, unknown in the 

 earlier eras, and just beginning to make their appearance 

 in the secondary epochs, they come into full force and 

 vigour in the tertiary and post-tertiary the periods at 

 which the higher animals and man are present to reap the 

 advantages of their more varied utilities. 



Such are the leading features of the great groups of the 

 vegetable kingdom groups to which we shall have frequent 

 occasion to allude when we come to treat the successive 

 stages of the fossil flora, and which are here displayed in 

 pictorial outline with a view to facilitate the comprehension 

 of these allusions. Though thus arranged in physiological 

 groups, the whole, from the simple cell that floats on the 

 putrid pool to the noblest tree of the forest, forms but one 

 orderly and co-adjusted system ; and could we combine 

 the extinct with the living, the same order and co-adjust- 

 ments would be found to run as unswervingly through the 

 wider combination. The conception is one, though its 

 expression through time and space must necessarily assume 

 the character of infinite diversity. 



Subdividing still further, according to their most marked 

 characteristics, whether external or internal, the botanist 

 arranges all the forms of vegetable life into some 60 or 

 70 orders, about 300 genera, and upwards of 100,000 

 . species. As most of these distinctions, however, are founded 

 on the form and connection of the flower, fruit, and leaf 

 organs which rarely or never occur in intelligible union and 

 preservation in a fossil state the palaeontologist is guided 

 in the main by the great structural distinctions already 

 adverted to, and not unfrequently by the simple but un- 

 satisfactory test of "general resemblance." On the whole, 

 Fossil Botany, or Palseophytology, as it is sometimes termed, 

 is by no means in a satisfactory state, and the science 

 languishes for the advent of some master minds to do for 



