TROPICAL EDUCATION. 25 



growth of those palaeozoic forests ample evidence of a 

 warm and almost West Indian climate among the low 

 basking islets of our northern carboniferous seas. Or 

 take once more the oolitic epoch in England, lithographed 

 on its own mud, with its puzzle-monkeys and its sago- 

 palms, its crocodiles and its deinosaurs, its winged 

 pterodactyls and its whale-like lizards. All these huge 

 creatures and these broad-leaved trees plainly indicate 

 the existence of a temperature over the whole of Northern 

 Europe almost as warm as that of the Malay Archipelago 

 in our own day. The weather report for all the earlier 

 ages stands almost uninterruptedly at Set Fair. 



Eoughly speaking, indeed, one may say that through 

 the long series of Primary and Secondary formations 

 hardly a trace can be found of ice or snow, autumn or 

 winter, leafless boughs or pinched and starved deciduous 

 vegetation. Everything is powerful, luxuriant, vivid. 

 Life, as Comus feared, was strangled with its waste 

 fertility. Once, indeed, in the Permian Age, all over the 

 temperate regions, north and south, we get passing indi- 

 cations of what seems very like a glacial epoch, partially 

 comparable to that great glaciation on whose last fringe 

 we still abide to-day. But the Ice Age of the Permian , 

 if such there were, passed away entirely, leaving the 

 world once more warm and fruitful up to the very poles 

 under conditions which we would now describe as essen- 

 tially tropical. 



It was with the Tertiary period perhaps, indeed, only 

 with the middle subdivision of that period that the 

 gradual cooling of the polar and intermediate regions 

 began. We know from the deposits of the chalk epoch 



