158 SKETCHES OF CREATION. 



mosses clo not exceed three feet in height. The stems of 

 Lepidodendron, after the falling of the leaves, were covered 

 with scars diagonally arranged, and are often mistaken by 

 the nninformed for "petrified snakes." The cones of these 

 plants are found in great abundance in Ohio. Another cu- 

 rious form of this period has been styled Sigillaria. Their 

 fluted trunks, from one to five feet in diameter, have some- 

 times been seen sixty and seventy feet in length. The flut- 

 ings are marked by a longitudinal series of pits, like the 

 impressions of a seal. In many instances these tree-trunks 

 have been found erect, evidently buried while standing by 

 accumulations of sand and mud (Fig. 67). Below are the 

 roots and rootlets — formerly called Stigmaria- — and the 

 very soil remaining in which they flourished. In the ex- 

 cavation of a bed of coal these petrified tree-trunks are not 

 unfrequently cut off below, when the slight taper of the 

 stem permits them to slide, by the force of gravity, down 

 into the mine. These " coal-pipes" are much dreaded by 

 the English miners, for almost every year they are the 

 cause of fatal accidents. " It is strange to reflect," says 

 Sir Charles Lyell, "how many thousands of these trees fell 

 originally in their native forests, in obedience to the law 

 of gravity, and how the few which continue to stand erect, 

 obeying, after myriads of ages, the same force, are cast 

 down to immolate their human victims." 



Let the reader embody before his mind's eye a group of 

 rush-like and fern-like trees and under-shrubs, interspersed 

 among gigantic club-mosses and occasional conifers, and he 

 has a picture of a carboniferous jungle — a jungle not en- 

 livened by the tread of quadrupeds or the singing of birds, 

 but mute as the solitudes of an African desert — voiceless 

 save when the alligator-like bellowings of the Archego- 

 saurus in a neighboring bayou waked the echoes of those 

 gloomy corridors, and startled the lesser amphibia from 



