Ancient Plants 



in their foliage, they differed from the latter in their 

 fruits a very important distinction, as will appear later. 

 In view of these discoveries we can no longer look 

 upon true ferns as either the most abundant or the 

 most characteristic plants of the period. Still, it is 

 not disputed that this group of plants namely, true 

 ferns then attained a luxuriance of which their modern 

 representatives, the ferns of our countryside, with the 

 possible exception of the sturdy bracken, bear little or 

 no traces. 



Like the ferns, the British clubmosses and horse- 

 tails of to-day give little indication that they are the 

 descendants of plants which at one time literally over- 

 shadowed the earth. 



The ancient clubmosses were gigantic plants, often 

 60 feet or more in height. Their stems were thickly 

 clad with leaves, arranged sometimes spirally and some- 

 times in vertical rows. Our modern British club- 

 mosses, on the other hand, are very insignificant both 

 in size and number. Like their ancestors, they have 

 their stems thickly clothed with leaves, but the leaves 

 are never more than a quarter of an inch in length. 



With a superficial resemblance to true mosses they 

 creep almost unseen and unrecognised along the 

 heather-clad slopes of our hills and mountains. 



Horsetails, or paddockpipes, as they are called by 

 farmers and others, are those strange plants with cylin- 

 drical and frequently fluted stems, conelike heads, 

 and whorls or circles of leaves with well-marked nodes 



