112 THE FAR PAST. 



difficult to conceive how, in some of their specific forms, 

 they should not be there. There was abundant food for 

 insects why not insectivorous reptiles and mammals to prey 

 upon them] Besides insects, there were also fruits and 

 seeds why not birds to feed upon them ; and why not the 

 larger herbivorous reptiles and quadrupeds to browse upon 

 the excess of vegetation that then clothed so large a portion 

 of the earth's surface 1 True, such plants as equisetums, 

 club-mosses, ferns, and coniferous trees, are, from the pecu- 

 liar principles they contain, the least fitted for the susten- 

 ance of known animals ; but then there were the succulent 

 shoots and roots of palms, of calamites, poacites, and other 

 leafy herbage the fruits of palms and other allied trees, 

 and these we know are the favourite food of many mammals 

 at the present day. Nay more ; as we know that certain 

 savage tribes exist on palm fruits, or farinaceous roots, and 

 on the fish of the ocean, we might carry this sort of reason- 

 ing still further, and ask whether the human race, in some 

 of its lowlier phases, might not also have been participators 

 in the life of the carboniferous era 1 To questions such as 

 these the palaeontologist has no other answer to offer than 

 that he has hitherto failed to detect the remains of birds 

 and mammals ; that as the food to be consumed and the 

 consumer are generally concomitants, so he more than ex- 

 pects the discovery of higher life during the coal-period ; 

 but that this higher life, though discovered to-morrow, 

 would necessarily take its stand lower in the scale of organ- 

 isation than the reptiles, and birds, and mammals which 

 are found in the immediately succeeding formations of the 

 new red sandstone and oolite. If there is one truth that 

 geology has established more clearly than another, it is that 

 of the progressive evolution of life on this globe ; not pro- 

 gress from imperfection to perfection, for all are alike fitted 

 to the end for which they were created, but progress from 



