286 
SILUEIA. 
[Chap. XIL 
CHAPTER XII. 
CAEBONIFEEOUS EOCKS. 
GREAT PRIMEVAL FLORA THE SOURCE OF THE OLD COAL DEPOSITS. GENERAL VIEW OF THESE 
DEPOSITS AND THEIR ORGANIC REMAINS IN THE BRITISH ISLES. 
Ascending in the scale of deposits, we have now reached another grand 
accumulation of strata, which is not only replete with many types of 
animal life peculiar to it and unknown in antecedent periods, but is spe- 
cially characterized by the earliest very abundant remains of a terrestrial 
vegetation. The reader will remember that feeble traces only of Land 
Plants have been discovered in the uppermost Silurian rocks. In the 
Devonian rocks, also, such remains, as before stated, are comparatively 
rare *, and only abound when we have passed upwards and are surrounded 
by the spoils of the oldest extensive forests with which we are acquainted. 
Now, as these primeval Plants were the substances out of which the 
great mass of coal has been formed, so we meet for the first time, in 
mounting up from the basement-rocks, with a profusion of the impressions 
and casts of Plants in stone. Some idea of the characters of the luxuriant 
vegetation which must in this age have overspread very wide areas of 
land, from polar to nearly equatorial latitudes, may be formed by inspect- 
ing the annexed woodcut, in which an ideal representation is given of a 
Ideal Yiew of the Vegetation of the Carboniferous Era. 
portion of the earth's surface as clothed with Plants the fragments of 
which bespeak a rich flora of Vascular Cryptogams, whose fossilized stems 
and leaves occur frequently in the shale and sandstone of the coal-fields, 
and, indeed, constitute the coal itself. - In the standard work of Bronn, 
von Mever, and Goppert, which gives the most complete general tabular 
* Though rare in Britain, Land Plants are comparatively numerous in the Devonian rocks of Gasne" 
and New Brunswick, as will be shown hereafter. 
