THE LO\\ER AND UPPER SILURIAN AGKS. 79 



The little that we know of Silurian plants is as 

 eloquent of plan and creation as that which we can 

 learn of animals. I saw not long ago a series of 

 genealogies in geological time reduced to tabular form 

 by that ingenious but imaginative physiologist, 

 Haeckel. In one of these appeared the imaginary 

 derivation of the higher plants from Algae or sea-weeds. 

 Nothing could more curiously contradict actual facts. 

 Algas were apparently in the Silurian neither more nor 

 less elevated than in the modern seas, and those forms 

 of vegetable life which may seem to bridge over 

 the space between them and the land plants in the 

 modern period, are wanting in the older geological 

 periods, while land plants seem to start at once into 

 being in the guise of club-mosses, a group by no 

 means of low standing. Our oldest land plants thus 

 represent one of the highest types of that cryptogamous 

 series to which they belong, and moreover are better 

 developed examples of that type than those now exist- 

 ing. We may say, if we please, that all the connecting 

 links have been lost; but this is begging the whole 

 question, since nothing but the existence of such links 

 could render the hypothesis of derivation possible. 

 Further, the occurrence of any number of successive 

 yet distinct species would not be the kind of chain 

 required, or rather would not be a chain at all. 



Yet in some respects development is obvious in 

 creation. Old forms of life are often embryonic, 01 

 resemble the young of modern animals, but enlarged 

 and exaggerated, as if they had overgrown themselves 



