326 Ancient Vegetation of the Earth. 



Coniferse. The existence of these two families, during this pe- 

 riod, is of high importance as signahzing an intimate relation 

 between them, by their organization ; and they form the inter- 

 mediate link between the vascular Cryptogamia, which composed, 

 almost alone, the primitive vegetation of the coal period, and the 

 phanerogamick Dicotyledons, strictly speaking, which constituted 

 a majority of the vegetable kingdom, during the tertiary period. 



Thus, to the vascular Cryptogamia, the first degree of ligneous 

 vegetation, succeeded the Coniferae and the Cycadeae, which held 

 a rank more elevated in the vegetable scale ; and to these last 

 succeeded the dicotyledonous plants, which occupy the summit 

 of that scale. 



In the vegetable kingdom, as in the animal, there has been, 

 then, a gradual improvement in the organization of the beings 

 which have successively existed upon our. earth, from the first 

 which appeared upon its surface even to those that inhabit it at. 

 the present day. 



The tertiary period, during which were deposited those earths 

 that now form the soil of the principal capitals of Europe, as 

 London, Paris, and Vienna, witnessed transformations, in the or- 

 ganick world, greater than any of those which had taken place 

 since the destruction of the primitive vegetation. 



In the animal kingdom: the creation of mammifers,(3) a class 

 which all naturalists concur in placing at the summit of the ani- 

 • mal scale, and by which nature seems to have preluded the crea- 

 tion of man ; in the vegetable kingdom, the creation of the 

 Dicotyledons, a grand division which, by unanimous consent, bot- 

 anists have ahvays placed at the head of this kingdom, and which, 

 by the variety of its forms and organization, by the magnitude 

 of its leaves and the beauty of its flowers and its fruits, must, of 

 necessity, have imprinted upon vegetation an aspect very difi"erent 

 from that which it had offered through all previous periods. 



This class of Dicotyledons, of which we are scarcely able to 

 cite any indications at the close of the secondary, presented itself, 



(3) In placing the first appearance of mammifers at the epoch of the tertiary 

 formation, I do not include the fact, unequalled elsewhere, of the fossil mam- 

 mifers of Stonesfield ; a case which forms an exception to all former experience, 

 and which cannot be detailed in so limited an essay. — Author's note. 



For drawings and brief descriptions of these fossils, which occurred in oolite, 

 see Lyell's Geology, American edition, Vol. I. pp. 154-5. — Translator. 



