196 EVIDENCE OF THE FOSSIL FLORA. 



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green. The olive leaf spoke not of merely a partial, but of a 

 general vegetation. Now, the coniferous lignite of the Lower 

 (Middle) Old Red Sandstone we find charged, like the olive 

 leaf, with a various and singularly interesting evidence. It 

 is something to know, that in the times of the Coccosteus and 

 Asterolepis there existed dry land, and that that land wore, 

 as at after periods, its soft, gay mantle of green. It is some- 

 thing also to know, that the verdant tint was not owing to 

 a profuse development of mere immaturities of the vege- 

 table kingdom, — crisp, slow-growing lichens, or watery spore- 

 propagated fungi, that shoot up to their full size in a night, 

 — nor even to an abundance of the more highly organized 

 families of the liverworts and the mosses. These may have 

 abounded then, as now, though we have not a shadow of 

 evidence that they did. But while we have no proof what- 

 ever of their existence, we have conclusive proof that there 

 existed orders and families of a rank far above them. On the 

 dry land of the Lower (Middle) Old Ked Sandstone, on which, 

 according to the theory of Adolphe Brongniart, nothing higher 

 than a lichen or a moss could have been expected, the ship- 

 carpenter might have hopefully taken axe in hand, to explore 

 the woods for some such stately pine as the one described by 



Milton, — 



Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast 

 Of some great admiral. " 



Viewed simply in its picturesque aspect, this olive leaf oi 

 the Old Bed seems not at all devoid of poetry. We sail up- 

 wards into the high geologic zones, passing from ancient to 

 still more ancient scenes of being ; and, as we voyage along, 

 find ever in the surrounding prospect, as in the existing scene 

 from which we set out, a graceful intermixture of land and 

 water, continent, river, and sea. We first coast along the 

 land of the Tertiary, inhabited by the strange quadrupeds 

 of Cuvier, and waving with the reeds and palms of the Paris 



