132 THE STORY OP THE EAETH AND MAN. 



Devonian we have pines almost as closely resembling 

 those of the Modern world as do those of the Coal 

 period. It is in accordance with this long duration of 

 the ferns and pines, that they are plants now of world- 

 wide distribution suited to all climates and stations. 

 Capacity to exist under varied conditions is near akin 

 to capacity to survive cosmical changes. A botanist in 

 the strange and monstrous woods which we have tried 

 to describe, would probably have found many curious 

 things among the smaller herbaceous plants, and 

 might have gathered several precursors of the modern 

 Exogens and Endogens which have not been preserved 

 to us as fossils, or are known only as obscure frag- 

 ments. But incomplete though our picture neces- 

 sarily is, and obscured by the dust of time, it may 

 serve in some degree to render green to our eyes 

 those truly primeval forests which treasured up for our 

 long winter nights the Palaeozoic sunshine, and estab- 

 lished for us those storehouses of heat-giving material 

 which work our engines and propel our ships and 

 carriages. Truly they lived not in vain, both as real- 

 izing for us a type of vegetation which otherwise we 

 could not have imagined, and as preparing the most 

 important of all the substrata of our modern arts and 

 manufactures. In this last regard even the vegetable 

 waste of the old coal swamps was most precious to us, 

 as the means of producing the clay iron ores of the 

 coal measures. I may close this notice of the Carbo- 

 niferous forests with a suggestive extract from a paper 

 by Professor Huxley in the Contemporary Review : 



