CARBONIFEROUS ERA. 105 



ledonous flora the majority of the preceding forms being 

 monocotyledons and conifers. Occurring as they do in 

 stony and carbonised fragments, their relations are but ill 

 understood ; and botanists have as yet contented themselves 

 by pointing out resemblances rather than in establishing 

 true affinities. Whatever their nature, they must have 

 grown in vast luxuriance and variety, clothing every river- 

 side and plain, and spreading over every swamp in one im- 

 penetrable jungle, and this, season after season, and age 

 after age, till their accumulated growth completed the coal- 

 beds now so indispensable to the progress of civilisation. 

 It is customary for a certain class of writers to descant on 

 the " dreary and flowerless monotony" of the vegetation of 

 the Coal period. This, however, is an error. Though all 

 the equisetunis and club-mosses and ferns were undoubted- 

 ly flowerless, the higher gynmogens and endogens were 

 not so, as we have evidence in the fossil flowers and fruits 

 (antholites and carpolites), which thickly stud many of the 

 shales; and we have often thought that what was wanting 

 in blossom was more than compensated for by the profu- 

 sion of light symmetrical, feathery fronds, and by the tall 

 pillar-like steins Avhich rose, each one boldly carved with 

 its own peculiar pattern. The trunks of a modern forest 

 are rough and gnarled; those of the period now under 

 review sprang up like the sculptured shafts of a medieval 

 temple, graceful in proportion, and rich in ornament through 

 the endless repetition of flutings, spirals, zigzags, lozenges, 

 ovals, and other geometrical designs these designs being 

 the persistent leaf-scars of a vegetation simpler in structure 

 and more primitive in plan. 



When we turn to the Animal Life of the period, which 

 belongs almost exclusively to the waters, we find it equally 

 exuberant in numbers and in variety. Life abounds near 

 shore and in the shallow waters life is rife in the deeper 



