284 THE HISTORY OF 



rolled the giant bodies of the Old World, gavials, lizards, 

 and turtles, fluttered the strange Pterodactyles like colossal 

 bats, and in the dry places played the wondrous opos- 

 sums ; while, in the ocean, the monster Plesiosaurians 

 and Icthyosaurians, half fish, half lizard, fed upon the 

 countless little inhabitants of the liquid element, which was, 

 moreover, alive with ammonites and nautili, strange crabs, 

 and peculiar star-fishes. The conditions of the Carboni- 

 ferous period were only repeated here on a very small 

 scale, and the remains of that world of plants are found in 

 the so-called Keuper formation, as letten coal, here and 

 there so abundant, that it has been thought worth the 

 trouble of obtaining by mining operations. The pecu- 

 liarities of the Coal Flora, consisted in the preponderance of 

 arborescent Cryptogamia, with which were associated only 

 solitary Conifers and Cycadacese; in the period of the 

 secondary formations, on the other hand, the latter are 

 the plants which especially determine the character, solitary 

 Monocotyledons occurring among them. But already to- 

 wards the close of the secondary period, the character of 

 the vegetation became altered, probably through a fresh, 

 slow depression beneath the sea, of a great portion of the 

 existing land, bordered round with coral banks, while 

 in other places more mighty continents, partly correspond- 

 ing to those existing at the present time, became upheaved. 

 Thence, we find, out of the last formations of the secondary 

 period, scarcely anything but a few Algae and Monocoty- 

 ledonous water-plants, and merely indications that the 

 Cycadacese and Conifers were not destroyed. 



The new arrangement now presenting itself, called by 

 geologists, Tertiary formations, began still with a widely 

 extended tropical character ; we find in high latitudes, as 

 in England, still a rich vegetation of Palms, which now 



