And&nt Vegetation of the Earth. 325 



diacece, the Ferns and the Equiseta of gigantick growth ; which 

 was an essential characteristick of this primitive creation. (2) 



After the destruction of this primitive vegetation, the vegetable 

 kingdom appears for a long period not to have attained the same 

 degree of development. Indeed, in the numerous layers of se- 

 condary earths which succeed the coal formations we scarcely 

 ever find those masses of vegetable imprints, a species of natural 

 herbariums, which, in these ancient depots of carbon attest to us 

 the simultaneous existence of a prodigious number of plants. 

 Scarcely in any part of these formations do we meet with thick 

 layers of fossil combustibles ; and never are such layers often 

 repeated, or found of such great extent as in the coal deposits. 

 Either the vegetable kingdom at this period occupied more cir- 

 cumscribed portions of the surface of the earth, or its scattered 

 individuals covered but incompletely a soil of little fertility, and 

 of which the revolutions of the globe had not permitted them to 

 become tranquil possessors ; or, finally, the condition of the sur- 

 face of the earth was not favourable to the preservation of the 

 vegetables which then inhabited it. 



Yet that long period which separated the coal from the tertiary 

 formations, a period that was the theatre of so many physical 

 revolutions of the globe, and which witnessed the appearance, in 

 the waters of the deep, of gigantick reptiles, types of the fantas- 

 tical organizations in which we may suppose we often recognize 

 those monsters born of the imaginations of the poets of antiquity ; 

 this period, I say, is remarkable in the history of the vegetable 

 kingdom, by the preponderance of two families which are lost, 

 so to speak, in the midst of the immense variety of vegetables 

 with which the surface of the earth is covered, at the present 

 day, but which then predominated over all the others, by their 

 number and their magnitude. These are the Coniferce, of which 

 the Fir, Pine, Yew and Cypress furnish well known examples : 

 and the Cycadece, vegetables wholly exotick, less numerous at 

 the present day than at this ancient period, and which joined to 

 the leaves and mien of the Palms, the essential structure of the 



(2) We find, it is true, in some parts of the secondary formations, a small num- 

 ber of arborescent Ferns and of the gigantick Equiseta, but yet of a stature much 

 less considerable than those of the coal formations ; nor do we discover, there, any 

 trace of the arborescent Lycopodiaceos analogous to the Lepidodendrons, — Jlu- 

 thor's note. 



