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Fig. 10.

PINUS SYLVESTRIS. (Scotch Fir.)

Fig. 11. CALAMITE? Of the Lower Old Red Sandstone. Shetland. (One eighth nat. size.)

Fig. 12. LYCOPODITE? Of the Lower Old Red Sandstone. Thurso. (Mag. two diameters.)

In the upper beds of the Upper Silurian, as has been already remarked, Lycopodites are the only terrestrial plants yet found. In the Lower Old Red Sandstone we find added to these, with Thallogens that bear at least the same general character as in the system beneath, minute ferns, and a greatly larger plant, allied to the horse tails. The Old Red flora seems to have been prevailingly an acrogenic flora; and yet with almost its first beginnings—contemporary with at least the earlier fossils of the system in Scotland, we find a true polycotyledonous tree, not lower in the scale than the araucarites of the Coal Measures—which in structure it greatly resembles—or than the pines or cedars of our own times (see Fig. 3). In the Middle Old Red Sandstone there occurs, with plants representative apparently of the ferns and their allies, a somewhat equivocal and doubtful organism, which may have been the panicle or compound fruit of some aquatic rush; while in the Upper Old Red, just ere the gorgeous flora of the Coal Measures began to be, there existed in considerable abundance a stately fern, the Cyclopteris Hibernicus (see Fig. 2), of mayhap not smaller proportions than our monarch of the British ferns, Osmunda regalis, associated with a peculiar lepidodendron, and what seems to be a lepidostrobus—possibly the fructiferous spike or cone of the latter, mingled with carbonaceous stems, which, in the simplicity of their texture, and their abundance, give evidence of a low but not scanty vegetation. Ere passing to the luxuriant carboniferous flora, I shall make but one other remark. The existing plants whence we derive our analogies in dealing with the vegetation of this early period, contribute but little, if at all, to the support of animal life. The ferns and their allies remain untouched by the grazing animals. Our native club mosses, though once used in medicine, are positively deleterious; the horse tails, though harmless, so abound in silex, which wraps them round with a cuticle of stone, that they are rarely cropped by cattle; while the thickets of fern which cover our hill-sides, and seem so temptingly rich and green in their season, scarce support the existence of a single creature, and remain untouched in stem and leaf, from their first appearance in spring, until they droop and wither under the frosts of early winter. Even the insects that infest the herbaria of the botanist almost never injure his ferns. Nor are our resin-producing conifers, though they nourish a few beetles, favorites with the herbivorous tribes in a much greater degree. Judging from all we yet know, the earliest terrestrial flora may have covered the dry land with its mantle of cheerful green, and served its general purposes, chemical and others, in the well-balanced economy of nature; but the herb-eating animals would have fared but ill even where it throve most luxuriantly; and it seems to harmonize with the fact of its non-edible character, that up to the present time we know not that a single herbivorous animal lived among its shades. From all that appears, it may be inferred that it had not to serve the purposes of the floras of the passing time, in which, according to the poet,

"The world's bread depends on the shooting of a seed."

Fig. 13. Fern? of Lower Old Red Sandstone. Orkney. (Nat. Size.)

The flora of the Coal Measures was the richest and most luxuriant, in at least individual productions, with which the fossil botanist has formed any acquaintance. Never before or since did our planet bear so rank a vegetation as that of which the numerous coal seams and inflammable shales of the carboniferous period form but a portion of the remains—the portion spared, in the first instance, by dissipation and decay, and in the second by the denuding agencies. Almost all our coal—the stored up fuel of a world—forms but a comparatively small part of the produce of this wonderful flora. Amid much that was so strange and antique of type in its productions as to set the analogies of the botanist at fault, there occurred one solitary order, not a few of whose species closely resembled their cogeners of the present time. I refer, of course, to its ferns. And these seem to have formed no small proportion of the entire flora of the period. Francis estimates the recent dorsiferous ferns of Great Britain at thirty-five species, and the species of all the other genera at six more—forty-one species in all; and as the flowering plants of the country do not fall short of fourteen hundred species, the ferns bear to them the rather small proportion of about one to thirty-five; whereas of the British Coal Measure flora, in which we do not yet reckon quite three hundred species of plants, about a hundred and twenty were ferns. Three sevenths of the entire carboniferous flora of Britain belonged to this familiar class; and for about fifty species more we can discover no nearer analogies than those which connect them with the fern allies. And if with the British Coal Measure we include those also of the Continent of America, we shall find the proportions in favor of the ferns still greater. The number of carboniferous plants hitherto described amounts, says M. Ad. Brogniart, to about five hundred, and of these two hundred and fifty—one half of the whole—were ferns.

Fig. 14.	Fig. 15.	Fig. 16.
Fig. 17.	Fig. 18.	Fig. 19.
FERNS OF THE COAL MEASURES.[6]

Fig. 20. ALTINGIA EXCELSA. Norfolk Island Pine. (Young Specimen.)

Rising in the scale from the lower to the higher vegetable forms of the system—from its ferns to its trees—we find great conifers—so great that they must have raised their heads more than a hundred feet over the soil; and such was their abundance in this neighborhood, that one can scarce examine a fragment of coal beside one's household fire that is not charged with their carbonized remains. Though marked by certain peculiarities of structure, they bore, as is shown by the fossil trunks of Granton and Craigleith, the familiar outlines of true coniferous trees; and would mayhap have differed no more in appearance from their successors of the same order that now live in our forests, than these differ from the conifers of New Zealand or of New South Wales. We have thus, in the numerous ferns and numerous coniferous trees of the Coal Measures, known objects by which to conceive of some of the more prominent features of the flora of which they composed so large a part. We have not inadequate conceptions of at once the giants of its forests and the green swathe of its plains and hill-sides—of its mighty trees and its dwarf underwood—of its cedars of Lebanon, so to speak, and its hyssop of the wall. But of an intermediate class we have no existing representatives; and in this class the fossil botanist finds puzzles and enigmas with which hitherto at least he has been able to deal with only indifferent success. There is a view, however, sufficiently simple, which may be found somewhat to lessen, if not altogether remove, the difficulty. Nature does not dwell willingly in mediocrity; and so in all ages she as certainly produced trees, or plants of tree-like proportions and bulk, as she did minute shrubs and herbs. In not a few of the existing orders and families, such as the Rosaceæ, the Leguminosæ, the Myrtaceæ, and many others, we have plants of all sizes, from the creeping herb, half hidden in the sward, to the stately tree. The wild dwarf strawberry and minute stone-bramble are of the same order as our finer orchard trees—apple, pear, and plum—or as those noble hawthorn, mountain ash, and wild cherry trees, that impart such beauty to our lawns and woods; and the minute spring vetch and everlasting pea are denizens of the same great family as the tall locust and rosewood trees, and the gorgeous laburnum. Did there exist no other plants than the Rosaceæ or the Leguminosæ, we would possess, notwithstanding, herbs, shrubs, and trees, just as we do now. And in plants of a greatly humbler order we have instances of similar variety in point of size. The humblest grass in our meadows belongs to the same natural order as the tall bamboo, that, shooting up its panicles amid the jungles of India to the height of sixty feet, looks down upon all the second class trees of the country. Again, the minute forked spleenwort of Arthur Seat, which rarely exceeds three inches in length, is of the same family as those tree-ferns of New Zealand and Tasmania that rise to an elevation of from twenty to thirty feet. And we know how in the ferns provision is made for the attainment and maintenance of the tree-like size and character. The rachis, which in the smaller species is either subterranean or runs along the ground, takes in the tree-fern a different direction, and, rising erect, climbs slowly upwards in the character of a trunk or stem, and sends out atop, year after year, a higher and yet higher coronal of fronds. And in order to impart the necessary strength to this trunk, and to enable it to war for ages with the elements, its mass of soft cellular tissue is strengthened all round by internal buttresses of dense vascular fibre, tough and elastic as the strongest woods. Now, not a few of the more anomalous forms of the Coal Measures seem to be simply fern allies of the types Lycopodiaceæ, Marsileaceæ, and Equisetum, that, escaping from the mediocrity of mere herbs, shot up into trees—some of them very great trees—and that had of necessity to be furnished with a tissue widely different from that of their minuter contemporaries and successors. It was of course an absolute mechanical necessity, that if they were to present, by being tall and large, a wide front to the tempest, they should also be comparatively solid and strong to resist it; but with this simple mechanical requirement there seems to have mingled a principle of a more occult character. The Gymnogens or conifers were the highest vegetable existences of the period—its true trees; and all the tree-like fern allies were strengthened to meet the necessities of their increased size, on, if I may so speak, a coniferous principle. Tissue resembling that of their contemporary conifers imparted the necessary rigidity to their framework; nay, so strangely were they pervaded throughout by the coniferous characteristics, that it seems difficult to determine whether they really most resembled the acrogenous or gymnogenous families. The Lepidodendra—great plants of the club moss type, that rose from fifty to seventy feet in height—had well nigh as many points of resemblance to the coniferæ as to the Lycopodites. The Calamites—reed-like, jointed plants, that more nearly resemble the Equisetaceæ than aught else which now exists, but which attained, in the larger specimens, to the height of ordinary trees, also manifest very decidedly, in their internal structure, some of the characteristics of the conifers. It has been remarked by Lindley and Hutton of even Sphenophyllum—a genus of plants with verticillate leaves, of which at least six species occur in our Coal Measures, and which Brogniart refers to one of the humblest families of the fern allies—that it seems at least as nearly related to the Coniferæ as to its lowlier representatives, the Marsileaceæ. And it is this union of traits, pertaining to what are now widely separated orders, that imparts to not a few of the vegetables of the Coal Measures their singularly anomalous character.

Fig. 21. EAST INDIA TREE-FERN.[7] (Asophila perrotetiana.)

Fig. 22. SECTION OF STEM OF TREE-FERN.[8] (Cyathea.)

Fig. 23.
Fig. 24.	Fig. 25.
LEPIDODENDRON STERNBERGII.[9]

Fig. 26. CALAMITES MOUGEOTII.

Fig. 27. SPHENOPHYLLUM DENTATUM.

Fig. 28. SIGILLARIA RENIFORMIS.

Let me attempt introducing you more intimately to one of those plants which present scarce any analogy with existing forms, and which must have imparted so strange a character and appearance to the flora of the Coal Measures. The Sigillaria formed a numerous genus of the Carboniferous period: no fewer than twenty-two different species have been enumerated in the British coal fields alone; and such was their individual abundance, that there are great seams of coal which seem to be almost entirely composed of their remains. At least the ancient soil on which these seams rest, and on which their materials appear to have been elaborated from the elements, is in many instances as thickly traversed by their underground stems as the soil occupied by our densest forests is traversed by the tangled roots of the trees by which it is covered; and we often find associated with them in these cases the remains of no other plant. The Sigillaria were remarkable for their beautifully sculptured stems, various in their pattern, according to their species. All were fluted vertically, somewhat like columns of the Grecian Doric; and each flute or channel had its line of sculpture running adown its centre. In one species (S. flexuosa) the sculpture consists of round knobs, surrounded by single rings, like the heads of the bolts of the ship carpenter; in another (S. reniformis) the knobs are double, and of an oval form, somewhat resembling pairs of kidneys—a resemblance to which the species owes its name. In another species (S. catenulata) what seems a minute chain of distinctly formed elliptical links drops down the middle of each flute; in yet another (S. oculata) the carvings are of an oval form, and, bearing each a round impression in its centre, they somewhat resemble rows of staring goggle-eyes; while the carvings in yet another species (S. pachyderma) consist chiefly of crescent-shaped depressions. The roots, or rather underground stems, of this curious genus attracted notice, from their singularity, long ere their connection with the carved and fluted stems had been determined, and have been often described as the "stigmaria" of the fossil botanist. They, too, have their curious carvings, consisting of deeply marked stigmata, quincuncially arranged, with each a little ring at its bottom, and, in at least one rare species, surrounded by a sculptured star. Unlike true roots, they terminate abruptly; each rootlet which they send forth was jointed to the little ring or dimpled knob at the bottom of the stigmata; and the appearance of the whole, as it radiated from the central mass, whence the carved trunk proceeded, somewhat resembled that of an enormous coach-wheel divested of the rim. Unfortunately we cannot yet complete our description of this strange plant. A specimen, traced for about forty feet across a shale bed, was found to bifurcate atop into two great branches—a characteristic in which, with several others, it differed from most of the tree-ferns—a class of plants to which Adolphe Brogniart is inclined to deem it related; but no specimen has yet shown the nature of its foliage. I am, however, not a little disposed to believe with Brogniart that it may have borne as leaves some of the supposed ferns of the Coal Measures; nowhere, at least, have I found these lie so thickly, layer above layer, as around the stems of Sigillaria; and the fact that, even in our own times, plants widely differing from the tree-ferns—such, for instance, as one of the Cycadeæ—should bear leaves scarce distinguishable from fern fronds, may well reconcile us to an apparent anomaly in the case of an ancient plant such as Sigillaria, whose entire constitution, so far as it has been ascertained, appears to have been anomalous. The sculpturesque character of this richly fretted genus was shared by not a few of its contemporaries. The Ulodendra, with their rectilinear rows of circular scars, and their stems covered with leaf-like carvings, rivalled in effect the ornately relieved torus of a Corinthian column: Favularia, Knorria, Halonia, many of the Calamites, and all the Lepidodendra, exhibited the most delicate sculpturing. In walking among the ruins of this ancient flora, the Palæontologist almost feels as if he had got among the broken fragments of Italian palaces, erected long ages ago, when the architecture of Rome was most ornate, and every moulding was roughened with ornament; and in attempting to call up in fancy the old Carboniferous forests, he has to dwell on this peculiar feature as one of the most prominent, and to see, in the multitude of trunks darkened above by clouds of foliage, that rise upon him in the prospect, the slim columns of an elder Alhambra, roughened with arabesque tracery and exquisite filagree work.

Fig. 29. SIGILLARIA RENIFORMIS. (Nat. size.)

Fig. 30. SIGILLARIA PACHYDERMA. (One fourth nat. size.)

Fig. 31. STIGMARIA FICOIDES. (One fourth nat. size.)

Fig. 32. FAVULARIA TESSELLATA. (One fifth nat. size.)

Fig. 33. LEPIDODENDRON OBOVATUM. (Nat. size.)

Fig. 34. CYCAS REVOLUTA.	Fig.35. ZAMIA PUNGENS.
(Recent.)
Fig. 36. ZAMIA FENEONIS (Portland Oolite.)

Fig. 37. MANTELLIA NIDIFORMIS. (Portland Dirt-bed.)

In the Oolitic flora we find a few peculiar features introduced. The Cyeadeæ—a family of plants allied to the ferns on the one hand, and to the conifers on the other, and which in their general aspect not a little resemble stunted palms—appear in this flora for the first time. Its coniferous genera, too, receive great accessions to their numbers, and begin to resemble, more closely than at an earlier period, the genera which still continue to exist. The cypresses, the yews, the thujas, the dammaras, all make their earliest appearance in the flora of the Oolite. Among our existing woods there seem to be but two conifers (that attain to the dignity of trees) indigenous to Britain—the common yew, Taxus baccata, and the common Scotch fir, Pinus sylvestris; and yet we know that the latter alone formed, during the last few centuries, great woods, that darkened for many miles together the now barren moors and bare hill-sides of the Highlands of Scotland—moors and hill-sides that, though long since divested of their last tree, are still known by their old name of forests. In the times of the Oolite, on the other hand, Britain had from fourteen to twenty different species of conifers; and its great forests, of whose existence we have direct evidence in the very abundant lignites of the system, must have possessed a richness and variety which our ancient fir woods of the historic or human period could not have possessed. With the Conifers and the Cycadeæ there were many ferns associated—so many, that they still composed nearly two fifths of the entire flora; and associated with these, though in reduced proportions, we find the fern allies. The reduction, however, of these last is rather in species than in individuals. The Brora Coal, one of the most considerable Oolitic seams in Europe, seems to have been formed almost exclusively of an equisetum—E. columnare. In this flora the more equivocal productions of the Coal Measures are represented by what seems to be the last of the Calamites; but it contains no Lepidodendra—no Ulodendra—no Sigillaria—no Favularia—no Knorria or Halonia. Those monsters of the vegetable world that united to the forms of its humbler productions the bulk of trees, had, with the solitary exception of the Calamites, passed into extinction; and ere the close of the system they too had disappeared. The forms borne by most of the Oolitic plants were comparatively familiar forms. With the Acrogens and Gymnogens we find the first indication of the Liliaceæ, or lily-like plants—of plants, too, allied to the Pandanaceæ or screw pines, the fruits of which are sometimes preserved in a wonderfully perfect state of keeping in the Inferior Oolite, together with Carpolithes—palm-like fruits, very ornately sculptured—and the remains of at least one other monocotyledon, that bears the somewhat general name of an Endogenite. With these there occur a few disputed leaves, which I must persist in regarding as dicotyledonous. But they formed, whatever their true character, a very inconspicuous feature in the Oolitic flora; and not until the overlying Cretaceous System is ushered in do we find leaves in any considerable quantity decidedly of this high family; nor until we enter into the earlier Tertiaries do we succeed in detecting a true dicotyledonous tree. On such an amount of observation is this order of succession determined—though the evidence is, of course, mainly negative—that when, some eight or ten years ago, Dr. John Wilson, the learned Free Church missionary to the Parsees of India, submitted to me specimens of fossil woods which he had picked up in the Egyptian Desert, in order that I might if possible determine their age, I told him, ere yet the optical lapidary had prepared them for examination, that if they exhibited the coniferous structure, they might belong to any geologic period from the times of the Lower Old Red Sandstone downwards; but that if they manifested in their tissue the dicotyledonous character, they could not be older than the times of the Tertiary. On submitting them in thin slices to the microscope, they were found to exhibit the peculiar dicotyledonous structure as strongly as the oak or chestnut. And Lieutenant Newbold's researches in the deposit in which they occur has since demonstrated, on stratigraphical evidence, that not only does it belong to the great Tertiary division, but also to one of the comparatively modern formations of the Tertiary.

Fig. 38 EQUISETUM COLUMNARE. (Nat. size.)

Fig. 39. CARPOLITHES CONICA.	Fig. 40. CARPOLITHES BUCKLANDII.[10]
(Reduced one third.)

Fig. 41. ACER TRILOBATUM.[11] (Miocene of Œningen.)

Fig. 42. ULMUS BRONNII.[12] (Miocene of Bohemia.)

Fig. 43. PALMACITES LAMANONIS. (A Palm of the Miocene of Aix.)

The earlier flora of this Tertiary division presents an aspect widely different from that of any of the previous ones. The ferns and their allies sink into their existing proportions; nor do the coniferæ, previously so abundant, occupy any longer a prominent place. On the other hand, the dicotyledonous herbs and trees, previously so inconspicuous in creation, are largely developed. Trees of those Amentiferous orders to which the oak, the hazel, the beech, and the plane belong, were perhaps not less abundant in the Eocene woods than in those of the present time: they were mingled with trees of the Laurel, the Leguminous, and the Anonaceous or custard apple families, with many others; and deep forests, in the latitude of London (in which the intertropical forms must now be protected, as in the Crystal Palace, with coverings of glass, and warmed by artificial heat), abounded in graceful palms. Mr. Bowerbank found in the London clay of the island of Sheppey alone the fruits of no fewer than thirteen different species of this picturesque family, which lends so peculiar a feature to the landscapes in which it occurs; and ascertained that the undergrowth beneath was composed, in large proportion, of creeping plants of the gourd and melon order. From the middle or Miocene flora of the Tertiary division—of which we seem to possess in Britain only the small but interesting fragment detected by his Grace the Duke of Argyll among the trap-beds of Mull—most of the more exotic forms seem to have been excluded. The palms, however, still survive in no fewer than thirty-one different species, and we find in great abundance, in the place of the other exotics, remains of the plane and buckthorn families—part of a group of plants that in their general aspect, as shown in the Tertiary deposits of the Continent, not a little resembled the vegetation of the United States at the present day. The nearer we approach to existing times, the more familiar in form and outline do the herbs and trees become. We detect, as has been shown, at least one existing order in the ferns of the Coal Measures; we detect at least existing genera among the Coniferæ, Equisetaceæ, and Cycadaceæ of the Oolite; the acacias, gourds, and laurels of the Eocene flora, and the planes, willows, and buckthorns of the Miocene, though we fail to identify their species with aught that now lives, still more strongly remind us of the recent productions of our forests or conservatories; and, on entering, in our downward course, the Pleistocene period, we at length find ourselves among familiar species. On old terrestrial surfaces, that date before the times of the glacial period, and underlie the boulder clay, the remains of forests of oak, birch, hazel, and fir have been detected—all of the familiar species indigenous to the country, and which still flourish in our native woods. And it was held by the late Professor Edward Forbes, that the most ancient of his five existing British floras—that which occurs in the south-west of Ireland, and corresponds with the flora of the northwest of Spain and the Pyrenees—had been introduced into the country as early, perhaps, as the times of the Miocene. Be this, however, as it may, there can rest no doubt on the great antiquity of the prevailing trees of our indigenous forests.

The oak, the birch, the hazel, the Scotch fir, all lived, I repeat, in what is now Britain, ere the last great depression of the land. The gigantic northern elephant and rhinoceros, extinct for untold ages, forced their way through their tangled branches; and the British tiger and hyæna harbored in their thickets. Cuvier framed an argument for the fixity of species on the fact that the birds and beasts embalmed in the catacombs were identical in every respect with the animals of the same kinds that live now. But what, it has been asked, was a brief period of three thousand years, compared with the geologic ages? or how could any such argument be founded on a basis so little extended? It is, however, to no such narrow basis we can refer in the case of these woods. All human history is comprised in the nearer corner of the immense period which they measure out; and yet, from their first appearance in creation till now they have not altered a single fibre. And such, on this point, is the invariable testimony of Palæontologic science—testimony so invariable, that no great Palæontologist was ever yet an asserter of the development hypothesis. With the existing trees of our indigenous woods it is probable that in even these early times a considerable portion of the herbs of our recent flora would have been associated, though their remains, less fitted for preservation, have failed to leave distinct trace behind them. We at least know generally, that with each succeeding period there appeared a more extensively useful and various vegetation than that which had gone before. I have already referred to the sombre, unproductive character of the earliest terrestrial flora with which we are acquainted. It was a flora unfitted, apparently, for the support of either graminivorous bird or herbivorous quadruped. The singularly profuse vegetation of the Coal Measures was, with all its wild luxuriance, of a resembling cast. So far as appears, neither flock nor herd could have lived on its greenest and richest plains; nor does even the flora of the Oolite seem to have been in the least suited for the purposes of the shepherd or herdsman. Not until we enter on the Tertiary periods do we find floras amid which man might have profitably labored as a dresser of gardens, a tiller of fields, or a keeper of flocks and herds. Nay, there are whole orders and families of plants of the very first importance to man which do not appear until late in even the Tertiary ages. Some degree of doubt must always attach to merely negative evidence; but Agassiz, a geologist whose statements must be received with respect by every student of the science, finds reason to conclude that the order of the Rosaceæ—an order more important to the gardener than almost any other, and to which the apple, the pear, the quince, the cherry, the plum, the peach, the apricot, the victorine, the almond, the raspberry, the strawberry, and the various brambleberries belong, together with all the roses and the potentillas—was introduced only a short time previous to the appearance of man. And the true grasses—a still more important order, which, as the corn-bearing plants of the agriculturist, feed at the present time at least two thirds of the human species, and in their humbler varieties form the staple food of the grazing animals—scarce appear in the fossil state at all. They are peculiarly plants of the human period.

Let me instance one other family of which the fossil botanist has not yet succeeded in finding any trace in even the Tertiary deposits, and which appears to have been specially created for the gratification of human sense. Unlike the Rosaceæ, it exhibits no rich blow of color, or tempting show of luscious fruit;— it does not appeal very directly to either the sense of taste or of sight: but it is richly odoriferous; and, though deemed somewhat out of place in the garden for the last century and more, it enters largely into the composition of some of our most fashionable perfumes. I refer to the Labiate family—a family to which the lavenders, the mints, the thymes, and the hyssops belong, with basil, rosemary, and marjoram—all plants of "gray renown," as Shenstone happily remarks in his description of the herbal of his "Schoolmistress."

"Herbs too she knew, and well of each could speak,

That in her garden sipped the silvery dew,

Where no vain flower disclosed a gaudy streak,

But herbs for use and physic not a few,

Of gray renown within those borders grew.

The tufted basil, pun-provoking thyme,

And fragrant balm, and sage of sober hue.

"And marjoram sweet in shepherd's posie found,

And lavender, whose spikes of azure bloom

Shall be erewhile in arid bundles bound,

To lurk amid her labors of the loom,

And crown her kerchiefs clean with meikle rare perfume.

"And here trim rosemary, that whilom crowned

The daintiest garden of the proudest peer,

Ere, driven from its envied site, it found

A sacred shelter for its branches here,

Where, edged with gold, its glittering skirts appear,

With horehound gray, and mint of softer green."

All the plants here enumerated belong to the labiate family; which, though unfashionable even in Shenstone's days, have still their products favorably received in the very best society. The rosemary, whose banishment from the gardens of the great he specially records, enters largely in the composition of eau de Cologne. Of the lavenders, one species (Lavendula vera) yields the well known lavender oil, and another (L. latifolio) the spike oil. The peppermint (Meantha viridus) furnishes the essence so popular under that name among our confectioners; and one of the most valued perfumes of the East (next to the famous Attar, a product of the Rosaceæ) is the oil of the Patchouly plant, another of the labiates. Let me indulge, ere quitting this part of the subject, in a single remark. There have been classes of religionists, not wholly absent from our own country, and well known on the Continent, who have deemed it a merit to deny themselves every pleasure of sense, however innocent and delicate. The excellent but mistaken Pascal refused to look upon a lovely landscape; and the Port Royalist nuns remarked, somewhat simply for their side of the argument, that they seemed as if warring with Providence, seeing that the favors which he was abundantly showering upon them, they, in obedience to the stern law of their lives, were continually rejecting. But it is better, surely, to be on the side of Providence against Pascal and the nuns, than on the side of Pascal and the nuns against Providence. The great Creator, who has provided so wisely and abundantly for all his creatures, knows what is best for us, infinitely better than we do ourselves; and there is neither sense nor merit, surely, in churlishly refusing to partake of that ample entertainment, sprinkled with delicate perfumes, garnished with roses, and crowned with the most delicious fruit, which we now know was not only specially prepared for us, but also got ready, as nearly as we can judge, for the appointed hour of our appearance at the feast. This we also know, that when the Divine Man came into the world—unlike the Port Royalists, he did not refuse the temperate use of any of these luxuries, not even of that "ointment of spikenard, very precious" (a product of the labiate family), with which Mary anointed his feet.

Fig. 44. CYCLOPHTHALMUS BUCKLANDI. (A Fossil Scorpion of the Coal Measures of Bohemia.)

Fig. 45. FOSSIL DRAGON-FLY. Solenhofen.

Though it may at first seem a little out of place, let us anticipate here, for the sake of the illustration which it affords, one of the sections of the other great division of our subject—that which treats of the fossil animals. Let us run briefly over the geologic history of insects, in order that we may mark the peculiar light which it casts on the character of the ancient floras. No insects have yet been detected in the Silurian or Old Red Sandstone Systems. They first appear amid the hard, dry, flowerless vegetation of the Coal Measures, and in genera suited to its character. Among these the scorpions take a prominent place—carnivorous arachnidæ of ill repute, that live under stones and fallen trunks, and seize fast with their nippers upon the creatures on which they prey, crustaceans usually, such as the wood-louse, or insects, such as the earth-beetles and their grubs. With the scorpions there occur cockroaches of types not at all unlike the existing ones, and that, judging from their appearance, must have been foul feeders, to which scarce anything could have come amiss as food. Books, manuscripts, leather, ink, oil, meat, even the bodies of the dead, are devoured indiscriminately by the recent Blatta gigantea of the warmer parts of the globe—one of the most disagreeable pests of the European settler, or of war vessels on foreign stations. I have among my books an age-embrowned copy of Ramsay's "Tea Table Miscellany," that had been carried into foreign parts by a musical relation, after it had seen hard service at home, and had become smoke dried and black; and yet even it, though but little tempting, as might be thought, was not safe from the cockroaches; for, finding it left open one day, they ate out in half an hour half its table of contents, consisting of several leaves. Assuredly, if the ancient Blattæ were as little nice in their eating as the devourers of the "Tea Table Miscellany," they would not have lacked food amid even the unproductive flora and meagre fauna of the Coal Measures. With these ancient cockroaches a few locusts and beetles have been found associated, together with a small Tinea—a creature allied to the common clothes-moth, and a Phasmia—a creature related to the spectre insects. But the group is an inconsiderable one; for insects seem to have occupied no very conspicuous place in the carboniferous fauna. The beetles appear to have been of the wood and seed devouring kinds, and would probably have found their food among the conifers; the Phasmidæ and grasshoppers would have lived on the tender shoots of the less rigid plants their contemporaries; the Tinea, probably on ligneous or cottony fibre. Not a single insect has the system yet produced of the now numerous kinds that seek their food among flowers. In the Oolitic ages, however, insects become greatly more numerous—so numerous that they seemed to have formed almost exclusively the food of the earliest mammals, and apparently also of some of the flying reptiles of the time. The magnificent dragon-flies, the carnivorous tyrants of their race, were abundant; and we now know, that while they were, as their name indicates, dragons to the weaker insects, they themselves were devoured by dragons as truly such as were ever yet feigned by romancer of the middle ages. Ants were also common, with crickets, grasshoppers, bugs both of the land and water, beetles, two-winged flies, and, in species distinct from the preceding carboniferous ones, the disgusting cockroaches. And for the first time amid the remains of a flora that seems to have had its few flowers—though flowers could have formed no conspicuous feature in even an Oolitic landscape—we detect in a few broken fragments of the wings of butterflies, decided trace of the flower-sucking insects. Not, however, until we enter into the great Tertiary division do these become numerous. The first bee makes its appearance in the amber of the Eocene, locked up hermetically in its gem-like tomb—an embalmed corpse in a crystal coffin—along with fragments of flower-bearing herbs and trees. The first of the Bombycidæ too—insects that maybe seen suspended over flowers by the scarce visible vibrations of their wings, sucking the honied juices by means of their long, slender trunks—also appear in the amber, associated with moths, butterflies, and a few caterpillars. Bees and butterflies are present in increased proportions in the latter Tertiary deposits: but not until that terminal creation to which we ourselves belong was ushered on the scene did they receive their fullest development. There is exquisite poetry in Wordsworth's reference to "the soft murmur of the vagrant bee,"—

"A slender sound, yet hoary Time

Doth to the soul exalt it with the chime

Of all his years; a company

Of ages coming, ages gone,

Nations from before them sweeping."

And yet, mayhap, the naked scientific facts of the history of this busy insect are scarcely less poetic than the pleasing imagination of the poet regarding it. They tell that man's world, with all its griefs and troubles, is more emphatically a world of flowers than any of the creations that preceded it, and that as one great family—the grasses—were called into existence, in order, apparently, that he might enter in favoring circumstances upon his two earliest avocations, and be in good hope a keeper of herds and a tiller of the ground; and as another family of plants—the Rosaceæ—was created in order that the gardens which it would be also one of his vocations to keep and to dress should have their trees "good for food and pleasant to the taste;" so flowers in general were profusely produced just ere he appeared, to minister to that sense of beauty which distinguishes him from all the lower creatures, and to which he owes not a few of his most exquisite enjoyments. The poet accepted the bee as a sign of high significance: the geologist also accepts her as a sign. Her entombed remains testify to the gradual fitting up of our earth as a place of habitation for a creature destined to seek delight for the mind and the eye as certainly as for the grosser senses, and in especial marks the introduction of the stately forest trees, and the arrival of the delicious flowers. And,

"Thus in their stations lifting toward the sky

The foliaged head in cloud-like majesty,

The shadow-casting race of trees survive:

Thus in the train of spring arrive

Sweet flowers: what living eye hath viewed

Their myriads? endlessly renewed

Wherever strikes the sun's glad ray,

Where'er the subtile waters stray,

Wherever sportive zephyrs bend

Their course, or genial showers descend."