Feather stonhaugh^s Geological Report. 83 



these plants are closely allied to the ferns and fernlike plants 

 which grow in such luxuriance in the hot and moist situations 

 of tropical climates, especially in small insular localites, 

 and which are never found out of the tropics. These are 

 amongst the first and decided evidences we have that the cli- 

 mate in those remote times must have been of a constant high 

 temperature, far exceeding any thing known to the present 

 order of nature, and equally humid, for these immense plants 

 of a tropical growth, which, also, with occasional palms, form 

 the great mass of the fossil plants of the bituminous coal 

 measures, are found in a fossil state in very high northern lati- 

 tudes, and under circumstances which prove that they grew 

 there. Coniferous plants also have been found, showing that 

 the low regions had their elevated countries, like the tropical 

 regions of our own times. 



Taking fossils for our guide, the carboniferous limestone, 

 millstone grit and shale, and the bituminous coal measures, 

 may be viewed as the upper part of the group which has been 

 considered, on account of the strong generic resemblances of 

 their organic remains ; for although the trilobites, the producta, 

 and some other genera become less abundant, there is a 

 surprising increase of the zoophytes and radiaria, many of the 

 beds being entirely composed of corals and encrinites. The 

 environs of Nashville, in Tennessee, where the genus asterias 

 has been found, the rocks of the falls of the Ohio at Louis- 

 ville, and the shore of the Mississippi between Herculaneum 

 and St. Louis, are amongst the richest localities for fossils of 

 the carboniferous limestone. 



Looking, therefore, at the whole of the fossiliferous beds 

 hitherto considered, the student of ancient nature can here 

 contemplate a spectacle of the most surprising character, and 

 of which no pursuit but geology could lead to the disclosure. 

 He sees the types of much of what exists in the present order 

 of nature in the rocks that bear the first evidences of organi- 

 zation, and inferring from the resemblances what their probable 

 6* 



