THE CARBONIFEROUS PERIOD. 75 
grounds, grew to the height of lofty trees, yet 
the vegetation was of an inferior kind. 
There has been a gradation in time for the 
vegetable as well as the animal world. With the 
marine population of the more ancient geological 
ages we find nothing but sea-weeds, — of great 
variety, it is true, and, as it would seem, from 
some remains of the marine Cryptogams in early 
times, of immense size, as compared with modern 
sea-weeds. But in the Carboniferous period, the 
plants, though still requiring a soaked and marshy 
soil, were aerial or atmospheric plants : they were 
covered with leaves ; they breathed ; their fructi- 
fication was like that which now characterizes the 
ferns, the club-mosses, and the so-called “ horse- 
tail plants,” ( Equisetacece ,) those grasses of low, 
damp grounds, remarkable for the strongly marked 
articulations of the stem. 
These were the lords of the forests all over the 
world in the Carboniferous period. Wherever 
the Carboniferous deposits have been traced, in 
the United States, in Canada, in England, France, 
Belgium, Germany, in New Holland, at the Cape 
of Good Hope, and in South America, the gen- 
eral aspect of the vegetation has been found to 
be the same, though characterized in the different 
localities by specific differences of the same na- 
ture as those by which the various floras are dis- 
tinguished now in different parts of the same zone 
