branching crowns. The green-stemmed and
many-pointed mare's-tail was also conspicuous
in number and in magnitude; not merely of
two or three feet high, as in the present period
of the earth, but large green-jointed trees,
shooting up their whisking spires to fourteen
or fifteen feet. Thickly springing up in wild
and threatening squadrons over the morass,
they bent their heads in long rows after rows
over the edge of the muddy river, with sullen,
moveless, and interminable monotony. Here
and there, enormous sombre shrubs oppressed
the scene. The collective clumps resembled
the inextricable junction of several of our
thickest-foliaged trees, as though several oaks
had agreed to unite their trunks, and make one
—several beeches, the same—several poplars
—several limes—though not one of them bearing
likeness in trunk or foliage to oak, or
beech, or poplar, or lime, or any known tree
of present date.

Clumps also were there, of a rank
undergrowth, out of which limp bare stems shot up
to a great height, covered with a sickly white
mealy powder, and terminating, for the most
part, in coarse brown swollen heads, or gigantic
black fingers, varied with dull red bosses at
the tops of the great stems, broken cups, or
red and grey forks and spikes,—a sort of
monstrous club-moss and cup-moss, with
lichens, coarse water-weeds, and water-grasses
at the base.

Uncouth and terrible as were the forms to
the young man's eyes, there were some things
not without grace. Large trees, having their
entire trunks and boughs elegantly fluted,
bearing leaves at regular intervals on each
fluting upwards and along every bough,
rose up amidst the disordered vegetation.
Where the leaves had fallen from the lower
part of the trunk, marks were left, like seals,
at regular intervals on the flutings.*

* These trees are known in fossil botany as the Sigillariæ.

In many places, close to the trees just
described, huge tortuous succulent roots†
protruded from the ground, as if anxious to
exchange their darkness and want of air for the
light, and for the warm atmosphere, attracted
by the strong gases with which it was
impregnated.

† The Stigmaria.

Round the feet of the young man lay
intertangled bunches and bundles of wood-weeds,
river-weeds, and other weeds that seemed to
partake equally of the river and the sea; long
rank grasses, sword-like, spear-like, or with
club-like crowns of seeds, and fungi of hideous
shapes, gross, pulpy, like giants' heads, hairy
and bearded, and sometimes bursting and
sending forth steamy odours that were
scarcely to be borne, and which the youth
felt to be a deadly poison, but that for the
time he, somehow, was endowed with a
'charmed life.'

Spell-bound, he turned from these dismaying
sights, to trees that rose, to altitudes of from
sixty to eighty feet, having leaves in long
rows upon all the boughs, from which they
shot forth direct, and without the intervention
of any small twigs or other usual
connecting medium of foliage. The same course
of leaves had existed on the trunk, from
which they had fallen as the tree rose up to
maturity, and had left scars or scales, like a
Mosaic ornament, and a sign of their
progressive years.*

* The Lepidodendron.

Gazing through and beyond all these lofty
trunks, Flashley beheld in the distance a sort
of palm-like and pine-like trees, standing
against the pale blue sky, which far
transcended all the rest in altitude, and seemed
indeed, here and there, to rise to a hundred
feet above the whole range of other lofty
trees! His eyes ached as he stared at them.
It was not their altitude alone that caused a
painful impression, but the feeling of their
unbroken solitude—a loneliness unvisited by
a single bird, and with nothing between them
and the heavens, to which they seemed to
aspire for ever, and in vain.

No flowers on any of the trees and shrubs
around him were to be seen—and no fruits.
The tone of colour was grave, sullen, melancholy.
It was a solitude that seemed to feel
itself. Not only no bird was visible, but no
quadruped, insect, creeping thing, or other
form of animal life. The earth was devoted
solely to the production of enormous
vegetation.

To complete the pregnant solemnity of the
scene, there were no sounds of life or motion
in the air; all was silence.

Looking round with a forlorn and overawed
yet enquiring face, he discerned something
like two keen stars of arrowy light at
the foot of a gigantic fern-tree, at some
distance from him. The darting rays seemed
directed towards him. They were eyes; they
could be nothing else! He presently perceived
that the rough black elfin figure, with the
veins of stagnant gold, was seated there, and
that its eyes were fixed upon him!

'The scene amidst which you stand,' said
the Elfin in his echo-like voice, and without
moving from his seat beneath the tree, 'is the
stupendous vegetation of the elder world.
The trunks and stems of the antediluvian
earth erect their columns, and shoot up their
spires towards the clouds; their dull, coarse
foliage overhangs the swamps, and they drink
in, at every pore, the floating steam impregnated
with the nutriment of prodigies. No animal
life do you behold, for none is of this date,
nor could it live amidst these potent vapours
which feed the vegetation. And yet these
vast trees and plants, this richly poisoned
atmosphere, this absence of all animal life of
man, and beast, and bird, and creeping thing,
is all arranged in due order of progression,
that man may hereafter live, not merely a
savage life, but one civilised and refined, with