EVIDENCE OF THE FOSSIL FLORA. 181 



minnows or sticklebacks that swarmed in its rivers, might be 

 i>erhaps deemed ingenious in his expedients, but certainly not 

 very judicious in the use of them. It is worthy of remark, 

 however, that the Brachiopods of those Palaeozoic periods in 

 which the group occupied such large space in creation, con- 

 sisted of greatly larger and more important animals than any 

 which it contains in the present day. It has yielded to what 

 geological history shows to be the common fate, and sunk into 

 a state of degradation and decline. 



The geological history of the vegetable, like that of the 

 animal kingdom, has been pressed into the service of the de- 

 velopment hypothesis ; and certainly their respective courses, 

 both in actual arrangement and in their relation to human 

 knowledge, seem wonderfully alike. It is not much more 

 than twenty years since it was held that no exogenous plant 

 existed during the Carboniferous period. The frequent oc 

 currence of Coniferse in the Secondary deposits had been con 

 clusively determined from numerous specimens ; but, found- 

 ing on what seemed a large amount of negative evidence, it 

 was concluded that, previous to the Liasic age, nature had 

 failed to achieve a tree, and that the rich vegetation of the 

 Coal Measures had been exclusively composed of magnificent 

 immaturities of the vegetable kingdom, — of gigantic ferns 

 and club-mosses, that attained to the size of forest trees, and 

 of thickets of the swamp-loving horsetail family of plants, 

 that well-nigh rivalled in height those forests of masts which 

 darken the rivers of our great commercial cities. Such was 

 the view promulgated by M. Adolphe Brongniart ; and it may 

 be well to remark that, so far as the evidence on which it 

 was based was positive, the view was sound. It is a fact 

 that inferior orders of plants were developed in those ages in 

 a style which in their present state of degradation they never 

 exemplify : they took their place, not, as now, among the pig- 

 mies and abortions of creation, but among its tallest and 



