he meteorology
even of the earliest geological ages.

The peculiar character of the vegetable tissue in the trees of the
Carboniferous period, containing, as it did, a large supply of
resin drawn from the surrounding elements, confirms the view of the
atmospheric conditions above stated; and this fact, as well as the damp,
soggy soil in which the first forests must have grown, accounts for the
formation of coal in greater quantity and more combustible in quality
than is found in the more recent deposits. But stately as were those
fern forests, where plants which creep low at our feet to-day, or are
known to us chiefly as underbrush, or as rushes and grasses in swampy
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 fructification was like that which now
characterizes the ferns, the club-mosses, and the so-called "horse-tail
plants," (_Equisetaceae,_) 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 general aspect of the vegetation has been found to be the same,
though characterized in the different localities by specific
differences of the same nature as those by which the various floras are
distinguished now in different parts of the same zone. For instance, the
Temperate Zone throughout the world is characterized by certain families
of trees: by Oaks, Maples, Beeches, Birches, Pines, etc.; but the Oaks,
Maples, Beeches, Birches, and the like, of the American flora in that
latitude differ in species from the corresponding European flora. So
in the Carboniferous period, when more uniform climatic conditions
prevailed throughout the world, the cha