116 PICTURESQUE SKETCHES 



much more fully developed. The new red sandstone 

 itself, it is true, consists of little more than loose 

 sand and mud, deposited, perhaps rapidly, from the 

 fractured rocks of the earlier period. It is, there- 

 fore, very poor in fossils, and exhibits but few of these 

 hieroglyphics whose language we can interpret ; and, 

 although richer in this respect than England, the 

 whole continent of Europe is marked by a similar 

 comparative rarity of organic remains in the beds. 

 But afterwards, it would appear that, the subsidence 

 not having been complete, there remained in our la- 

 titudes a number of islands, forming an archipelago 

 not unfavourable to the existence of many races of 

 animals and vegetables, especially those capable of 

 supporting life in spite of constant oscillations and 

 changes of condition of the surface. 



We have seen that, even up to the very close of 

 the earlier epoch, there is no distinct and unques- 

 tionable evidence of the nature and position of the 

 land on which grew the vast forests from which coal 

 was elaborated. Here and there it has seemed that 

 the trees of which we find fragments must have grown 

 on the spot where broken trunks are now apparently 

 attached to their roots, the roots and trunks being 

 buried together in the very soil from which they ob- 

 tained their nourishment. But these instances are 

 rare and exceptional ; and although we may be 

 certain that the land was not far off, yet its exact 

 position, and whether it was a continent or an island, 

 or a group of islands, whether it extended south- 

 wards or northwards, whether it occupied what is 

 now the Atlantic Ocean, or was shaped like Europe, 

 and represented the two north-eastern continents, we 



