climates. From India and Australia, to the
lonely wastes of Baffin Bay and Melville Island,
every foot of land was covered with ferns, reeds,
club-mosses, and other wonders of the coal
measures.

The ferns, it is well known, are flowerless
plants, but they differed from their predecessors,
the algæ, in having stems and leaves. Some of
these tree-ferns attained an immense size. The
reed, which resembled the mare's-tail now seen
growing in our fens and ditches, was often
twenty-four times as thick as that, of the
present day, and several yards high; the club-
mosses attained such enormous dimensions,
that fragments of them have been found forty-
five feet long, and upwards of four feet in
diameter, almost as large as the stiff-firs
(Araucarians) belonging to this epoch.

Under a sky the heat of which was never
chilled by a cool breeze, rooted in steaming, dank,
bottomless morasses, heated by the scarcely
subdued fires of the granite, these plants grew at
an inconceivable rate. Some measure of this
kind was needed, to unload the air of the carbon
and store up immense forests in such a
compact shape as coal. The aspect of those
forests at an early period must have been
inconceivably sombre. Gloomy, immeasurable torpid
jungles of one sad whitish hue, they must have
looked like groves of dead sea-weeds; an
appearance often noticed in a slight degree in
some parts of America when the clouds have
intercepted the rays of the sun for some days
together. The sunbeams, the chemical rays of
which change the soft fibre into hard woody
substance, and eliminate the colouring matter,
or chlorophyle, only reached them late in the
day, and clothed them with resplendent green.

Some of the club-mosses were beautifully
marked with geometric patterns; one, figured
by Miller, is carved like the stone-work of a
church window in the waving style. The
sigillaria, of which twenty-two species are found in
British coal-fields alone, are remarkable for their
sculptured stems. They are fluted vertically,
like a Doric column, and each fluting is marked
by a line of sculpture, where the vessels
passed out from the stem to the leaves,
running down its centre. This sculpture
varied according to the species. In one it
resembled the bolt-heads used by ship-carpenters;
in another, a pair of beans set side
by side; in a third, two rows of goggle-eyes
stare at the spectator. These strange plants
had roots differing from anything else, projecting
from the centre like rays, and terminating
abruptly in a circle, like the spokes of a
cartwheel. One of the stigmaria is beautifully
marked like a meadow daisy, and its roots, or
underground stems, end abruptly like a cucumber.
One ulodendron, brought from the iron-
shale of Leith, exhibits the peculiarity of having
all its branches on one plane, like the tail of
a peacock, or the Madagascar-tree called the
"Traveller's Friend."

Plants of this class, without fruit or flower,
were useless, except to a few insects. Even to
this day, cattle will not crop the fern, and the
horse-tail reed is so distasteful on account of
the silex it contains, that they will not touch it
unless pressed by hunger. The reader will therefore
be little surprised to learn that the chief
inhabitants of the woods were hideous insects,
such as cockroaches, scorpions, beetles, and the
like; later on, however, in this epoch, traces are
found of two-winged flies, butterflies, and the
dragon-fly.

The fishes of this era, were armed with the
most frightful means of destruction; teeth more
sharp and trenchant than those of the crocodile;
dorsal spines like huge beautifully-carved
spearheads; stings of immense strength, above a
foot long, and furnished on each side with a
thick-set row of barbs hooked downwards.

At the close of this epoch, the sun shone
out in unclouded splendour, and the stars set
their first watch, and the moon hung out her
lamp; the air grew pure and bright; Nature
took on her livery of green; and the oceans and
lakes began to wear their deep pure hue. These
changes grew more marked as the new red
sandstone and limestone succeeded; climates and
seasons began to appear; and for the first time
we find animals confined to particular regions.
Tufted plants, like dwarf palms, and nearly
twenty different kinds of pine, have usurped the
place of many of the first land plants, for though
ferns still prevail in legions, and the horse-tail
reed still grows in swamps, yet the gigantic
club-mosses and other monsters of the vegetable
kingdom are gone for ever.

With this change of the flora came the great
lizards, creatures of enormous strength and
bulk; one, the fish-lizard (Ichthyosaurus), with
a head and teeth like those of a crocodile, and
an eye as large as a dessert-plate, had its huge
frame mounted on four paddles, which, aided by
the sweep of its tail, must have enabled it to go
like an express train through the waters, over
which it reigned in undisputed mastery. Coeval
with it, lived the plesio-saurus, or original sea-
serpent, often eighteen feet long, with its
immense neck reared high above the waters. The
megalo-saurus, forty feet long, with hind legs
almost two yards high, roamed by Stonesfield
or Tilgate Forest: the huge iguanodon, a
herb-eating lizard which excited Cuvier's utmost
astonishment, haunted the shores of the British
Channel; its giant remains at Lewes, made
classic ground by the genius of Gideon Mantell,
were among the earliest treasures recovered
from the stony depths. There was also the
mososaurus, or great monster-lizard of Maëstricht,
twenty-five feet long, with a head four feet in
length, and the wealden-lizard, twenty to thirty
feet in length (hylæo-saurus) with an immense
horny fringe, five to seventeen inches high on its
back: while through the tree-fern groves flitted
the huge flying-lizard (Pterodactyl); a real
dragon, like a monstrous bat, with its dusky wings
stretching twenty-seven feet across (or twice the
sweep of the condor of the Andes, or the frigate-
bird), and its powerful muzzle furnished with
sixty teeth, like those of a crocodile. This