836 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



Conifers, such as the pines. In any case, we must think of the larger 

 Carboniferous land-plants as including the non-seeding ferns and 

 tree-ferns, club-mosses and "horsetails", but also the seed-bearing 

 Pteridosperms and Cordaitese, two classes now lost in their evolved 

 descendants. As far as Man is concerned, the richness of the Carbon- 

 iferous vegetation was of an importance that cannot be exaggerated, 

 not only because we are still using the stored energy of coal when 

 we can — and not always according to our lights — but because it 

 was in the Carboniferous Period that seeds were evolved. For where 

 would man be without seeds ? 



Much is known in regard to the Carboniferous insects, many of 

 which were generalised types, each pointing on, not to one, but to 

 several of our modem orders. Thus the Protoblattoidea are believed 

 to be ancestral not only to the cockroaches, which they suggest, 

 but to termites, book-lice, bird-lice, and beetles. The mild climate 

 must have suited insects well, for they attained large size ; thus some 

 Carboniferous dragonflies had a spread of wing of 29 inches. The 

 body of a huge walking-stick insect (Titanophasma) from the 

 Coal Measures of France is upwards of a foot long. Many of the 

 Carboniferous insects were amphibious; some were aquatic in their 

 young stages only, just like our dragonflies and Mayflies; but others 

 were terrestrial from first to last. In those days there were no 

 flowers to visit, and the mouth-parts of most of the Carboniferous 

 fossil-insects that have been deciphered suggest carnivorous habits. 

 Another feature is the apparent absence of the quiescent stages 

 which we know as pupae or cocoons in all the higher insects of 

 modem times. This meant in part that the mild and doubtless even 

 warm Carboniferous winters could be survived by insects in the 

 adult state. The colonisation of the dry land had also been effected 

 thus early by centipedes and millipedes, and by spiders and scor- 

 pions, while on a very different line there were a few land-snafls, 

 which carried on the experiment successfully begun in the time of 

 the Old Red Sandstone. 



The highest animals in the Carboniferous seas were the fishes, 

 and there seem to have been a great many sharks, some approaching 

 closely to the Port Jackson shark type. There were also representa- 

 tives of a very progressive order, that of the Fringed-fin fishes 

 (Crossopterygians), which have only two living relatives to-day 

 (Polypterus and Calamoichthys), yet may have been ancestral to 

 both lung-fishes and amphibians. But the dominant fishes in the Car- 

 boniferous seas were primitive, no longer represented, yet forerunners 

 of the sturgeons, spoon-bills and gar-pikes, and eventually of the 

 ordinary Bony Fishes of to-day. The big fact is that besides the gristly 

 sharks, the progressive Fringed-fins, and the mud-fishes or lung-fishes, 

 there were in the Carboniferous waters the early representatives of 

 the Bony Fish type (Teleosteans), which later attained supremacy. 



