WERE LAID DOWN 



aspect of this exuberant vegetation, these immense trees, 

 these elegant arborescent ferns with airy foliage, fine cut, 

 like delicate lace. Nothing at the present day can convey 

 to us an idea of the prodigious and immense extent of 

 never -changing verdure which clothed the earth, from 

 pole to pole, under the high temperature which every- 

 where prevailed over the whole terrestrial globe. In the 

 depths of these inextricable forests parasitic plants were 

 suspended from the trunks of the great trees, in tufts or 

 garlands, like the wild vines of our tropical forests. They 

 were nearly all pretty, fern-like plants, they attached 

 themselves to the stems of the great trees, like the 

 orchids of our times." The margin of the waters would 

 also be covered with various plants with light and 

 whorled leaves, belonging, perhaps, to the Dicotyledons. 

 Before leaving the subject of the plants of the coal 

 measures, we should perhaps mention as one of the most 

 interesting discoveries of the present generation that 

 whereas the links between the fern-like trees of those 

 days and the cycads, or early group of seed-bearing plants, 

 were for long missing, they have been found by the 

 researches of Professor F. W. Oliver, F.R.S., who has 

 identified in the Lyginodendran a seed-bearing fern from 

 the coal measures. 



We must now turn to the less interesting but not less 

 important topic of the animal life of the Carboniferous 

 period. At the beginning of the period when only a 

 small portion of the British Isles was above the waters, 

 and an ocean rolled from Ireland to China, the life of 

 which the most important relics were left was that of the 



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