t?.] THE COAL IN THE FIRE. 95 



best coal is actually made up of millions of the minute 

 seeds of club-mosses, such as grow a few of them, and 

 those very small on our moors ; a proof, surely, not 

 only of the vast amount of the vegetation in the coal- 

 making age, but also of the vast time during which it 

 lasted. The Lepidodendra may have been fifty or sixty 

 feet high. There is not a Lycopodium in the world 

 now, I believe, five feet high. But the club-mosses 

 are now, in these islands and elsewhere, lovers of wet 

 and peaty soils, and so may their huger prototypes 

 have been, in the old forests of the coal. 



Of the Sigillariae we cannot say as much with 

 certainty, for botanists are not agreed as to what low 

 order of flowerless plants they belong. But that they 

 rooted in clay beds there is proof, as you will hear 

 presently. 



And as to the Conifers, or pine-like trees the 

 Dadoxylon, of which the pith goes by the name of 

 Sternbergia, and the uncertain tree which furnishes in 

 some coal-measures bushels of a seed connected with 

 that of the yew we may suppose that they would find 

 no more difficulty in growing in swamps than the 

 cypress, which forms so large a portion of the vegetation 

 in the swamps of the Southern United States. 



I have given you these hints, because you will 

 naturally wish to know what sort of a world it was in 

 which all these strange plants grew and turned into 

 coal. 



My answer is, that it was most probably just like 

 the world in which we are living now, with the one 

 exception that the plants and animals are different. 



It was the fashion a few years since to explain the 

 coal like other phenomena of geology by some mere 



