74 GEOLOGY OF THE ISLE OF WIGHT 



immense duration, when over pretty well the whole earth 

 there seem to have been comparatively low lands covered 

 with a luxuriant and very strange vegetation. The 

 remains of these ancient forests have formed the coal 

 measures, which tell of the most widespread and longest 

 enduring growth of vegetation the world has seen. 

 Strange as some of the plants were gigantic horsetails 

 and club-mosses growing into trees many were exquis- 

 itely beautiful. There were no flowering plants, but the 

 ferns, many of them tree ferns, were of as delicate beauty 

 as those of the present day. Many of the ferns bore seeds, 

 and were not reproduced by spores, such as we see on the 

 fronds of our present ferns. That is a wonderful story 

 of plant history, which has only been read in recent years. 



After the long Carboniferous period came to an end 

 followed periods in which great formations of red sand- 

 stone were made, the Permian, and the New Red Sand- 

 stone or Trias. During much of this time the condition 

 of the country seems to have resembled that of the 

 Steppes of Central Asia, or even the great desert of Sahara 

 great dry sandy deserts hills of bare rock with screes 

 of broken fragments heaped up at their base, salt 

 inland lakes, depositing, as the effect of intense evaporation, 

 the beds of rock salt we find in Cheshire or elsewhere, in 

 the same manner as is taking place to-day in the Caspian 

 Sea, in the salt lakes of the northern edge of the Sahara, 

 and in the Great Salt Lake of Utah. 



At the close of the period the land here sank beneath 

 the sea again a sea of coral islands like the South Pacific 

 of to-day. There were many oscillations of level, or 

 changes of currents ; and bands of clay, when mud from 

 the land was laid down, alternate with beds of limestone 

 formed in the clearer coral seas. These strata form a 

 period known as the Jurassic, from the large development 

 of the rocks in the Jura mountains. In England the 

 period includes the Liassic and Oolitic epochs. The 



