102 THE STORY OP THE EARTH AND MAN. 



through a Devonian forest, in which we may include 

 the vegetation of the several subordinate periods into 

 which this great era was divisible. The Devonian 

 woods were probably, like those of the succeeding 

 carboniferous period, dense and dark, composed of 

 but few species of plants, and these somewhat mono- 

 tonous in appearance, and spreading out into broad 

 swampy jungles, encroaching on the shallow bays and 

 estuaries. Landing on one of these flats, we may 

 first cast our eyes over a wide expanse, covered with 

 what at a distance we might regard as reeds or rushes. 

 But on a near approach they appear very different; 

 rising in slender, graceful stems, they fork again and 

 again, and their thin branches are sparsely covered 

 with minute needle-like leaves, while the young shoots 

 curl over in graceful tresses, and the older are covered 

 with little oval fruits, or spore-cases ; for these plants 

 are cryptogamous, or flowerless. This singular vege- 

 tation stretches for miles along the muddy flats, and 

 rises to a height of two or three feet from a knotted 

 mass of cylindrical roots or root-stocks, twining like 

 snakes through and over the soil. This plant may, 

 according as we are influenced by its fruit or struc- 

 ture, be regarded as allied to the modern club-mosses 

 or the modern pill-worts. It is Psilophyton, in every 

 country one of the most characteristic plants of the 

 period, though, when imperfectly preserved, often 

 relegated by careless and unskilled observers to the 

 all-engulfing group of fucoids. A little further inland 

 we see a grove of graceful trees, forking like Psi~ 



