EVIDENCE OF THE FOSSIL FLORA. l97 



Basin ; the land of the Wealden, with its gigantic iguanodon 

 lustling amid its tree ferns and its cycadese, comes next ; 

 tlien comes the green land of the Oolite, with its little pouched 

 insectivorous quadruped, its flying reptiles, its vast jungles of 

 the Brora equisetum, and its forests of the Helmsdale pine ; 

 and then, dimly as through a haze, we mark, as we speed on, 

 the thinly scattered islands of the New Red Sandstone, and 

 })ick up in our course a large floating leaf, veiled like that of 

 a cabbage, which not a little puzzles the botanists of the ex- 

 pedition. And now we near the vast Carboniferous continent, 

 and see along the undulating outline, between us and the sky, 

 the strange forms of a vegetation, compared with which that 

 of every previously seen land seems stunted and poor. We 

 speed day after day along endless forests, in which gigantic 

 club-mosses wave in air a hundred feet over head, and skirt 

 interminable marshes, in which thickets of reeds overtop the 

 mast-head. And, where mighty rivers come rolling to the 

 sea, we mark, through the long-retiring vistas which they open 

 into the interior, the higher grounds of the country covered 

 with coniferous trees, and see doddered trunks of vast size, 

 like those of Granton and Craigleith, reclining under the banks 

 in deep muddy reaches, with their decaying tops turned adown 

 the current. At length the furthermost promontory of this 

 long range of coast comes full in view : we near it, — we 

 have come up abreast of it : we see the shells of the Moun- 

 tain Limestone glittering white along its further shore, and 

 the green depths under our keel lightened by the flush of 

 innumerable corals ; and then, bidding farewell to the land 

 for ever, — for so the geologists of but five years ago would 

 have advised, — we launch into the unmeasured ocean of the 

 Old Red, with its three consecutive zones of animal life. 

 Not a single patch of land more do those geologic charts ex- 

 hibit which we still regard as new. The zones of the Silu- 

 rian and Cambrian succeed the zones of the Old Red ; and. 



