1879. | Columbia College. 509 
some of the flat crushing teeth of which were six inches in length, 
four inches wide, and an inch and a half thick. 
Some of the slabs of stone from Linton, Ohio, upon being 
split open, showed the heads, limbs, scales, etc., of Amphibians, 
represented at the present time by the frogs and salamanders. It 
is at once apparent that this is the heading of a new chapter. In 
all the stony pages that we have glanced over, we have not seen 
characters like these. If we should follow out the records here 
begun, through all the following ages, we would find, indeed, that 
it is a chapter of wonders, containing the lives and struggles of 
the hugest and strangest monsters that have ever lived. We can- 
not pass on, however, without glancing at the flora of the Car- 
boniferous, the relics of which these cases contain to overflowing. 
These forms, that are traced so delicately on the stones, were once 
living plants that millions of years ago bowed to the passing 
winds and drank in the sunshine as our most familiar trees and 
ferns do to-day. These fragments of trunks, branches, leaves 
and cones give us a faint glimpse into the dark moist forests that 
clothed our land in the coal period. Many of the fossil plants 
we at once recognize as ferns, so nearly do they approach in 
form these beautiful plants which we meet in all our rambles. 
Others, after considerable study, have been shown to be closely - 
related to the little ground-pines or club mosses, which are also 
quite common in our woods. These ancient Lycopods, however, 
instead of being only a few inches in height, with cones an inch 
long, were gigantic trees sometimes upwards of seventy or eighty 
feet in length, with elegantly scarred trunks, and bearing large 
cones upon their gracefully pendant boughs. Another of our 
common plants, the Equisetum, also had giant representatives in 
that ancient flora. These, together with the Sigillarias, with their 
beautifully fluted columnar trunks, furnished the material from 
which our great stores of coal were formed. What at once appears 
as a remarkable fact upon looking over these fossils, is that they 
all belong to the lowest grade of vegetation, the cryptogamous or 
flowerless plants. Among all the hundreds of coal plants here 
assembled, we look in vain for so much as a single leaf of a 
broad-leaved plant like our maples and oaks. It was long sup- 
posed that there was a total lack of flowers in the Carboniferous 
forests, but a specimen in this collection shows a branch of some 
nown plant with the remains of flowers — distin- 
guishable. 
