ANCIENT PLANTS 



CHAPTER I 

 INTRODUCTORY 



The lore of the plants which have successively 

 clothed this ancient earth during the thousands of 

 centuries before men appeared is generally ignored or 

 tossed on one side with a contemptuous comment on 

 the dullness and " dry ness" of fossil botany. 



It is true that all that remains of the once luxuriant 

 vegetation are fragments preserved in stone, fragments 

 which often show little of beauty or value to the un- 

 trained eye; but nevertheless these fragments can tell 

 a story of great interest when once we have the clue 

 to their meaning. 



The plants which lived when the world was young 

 were not the same as those which live to-day, yet they 

 filled much the same place in the economy of nature, 

 and were as vitally important to the animals then de- 

 pending on them as are the plants which are now in- 

 dispensable to man. To-day the life of the modern 

 plants interests many people, and even philosophers 

 have examined the structure of their bodies and have 

 pondered over the great unanswered questions of the 

 cause and the course of their evolution. But all the 

 plants which are now alive are the descendants of those 

 which lived a few years ago, and those again came down 

 through generation after generation from the plants which 



