102 THE FAR PAST. 



the then peculiar distribution of sea and land, in the alti- 

 tude of its shores, in the arrangement of warmer aerial and 

 oceanic currents, and generally in a concentration of these 

 conditions, such as would produce the necessary climate. 

 And, after all as in the case of the great tertiary elephants 

 and rhinoceroses of Northern Europe, whose representatives 

 rfre now' foun'd 'oriy in the tropics we know too little of 

 ^tb.c nature of the plants to say under what conditions of 

 ' climate t^y would attain their greatest exuberance, though 

 we clearly perceive from their foliage and mode of growth 

 that it was at once equable and continuous.* Generally 

 speaking, we find them resembling equisetums, marsh- 

 grasses, reeds, club-mosses, tree-ferns, and coniferous trees ; 

 and these in existing nature attain their maximum de- 

 velopment in warm-temperate and subtropical, rather than 

 in equatorial regions. The "Wellingtonias of California, 

 and the pines of Norfolk Island, are more gigantic than the 

 largest coniferous tree yet discovered in the coal-measures ; 

 the tree-ferns of New Zealand luxuriate in humid and shady 

 spots ; the tussack of Falkland Island, and the phormium 

 of New Zealand, show leaves as broad and long as the 

 poacites of the carboniferous period ; while accumulations 

 of peat-growth are the products of coldly-temperate, rather 

 than of equatorial latitudes. Besides all this, we have 

 coal-beds in other formations the oolite, the Wealden, and 

 tertiary ; and if we are to go in search of abnormal condi- 

 tions for the production of the one, we must admit the 

 existence of similar causes for the production of the other 

 an admission, as we shall afterwards see, that would lead to 



* It is more than likely, as suggested by the late Robert Brown, that 

 many of the Coal-plants were inhabitants of the swamp and shallow 

 waters estuarine and marine ; and that, rooted in mud, rich in organic 

 matters, and surrounded by water of an equable and genial tempera- 

 ture, they enjoyed the conditions at once of a rapid and of a gigantic 

 growth. 



