THE COAL FLORA.
We have before us "a low shore thickly covered with vegetation. High trees of wonderful form stand out far into the water. ,There seems no intervening beach. A thick hedge of reeds, tall as the masts of pinnaces, runs along the deeper bays, like water-flags at the edge of a lake. A river of vast volume comes rolling from the interior, darkening the water for leagues with its slime and mud, and bearing with it to the operi sea, reeds, and fern, and cones of pine, and immense floats of leaves, and now and then some bulky tree, undermined and uprooted by the current. We near the coast, and now enter the opening of the stream. A scarce-penetrable phalanx of reeds, that attain to the height and wellnigh the bulk of forest trees, is ranged on either handy The bright and glossy stems seem rodded like Gothic columns, the pointed leaves stand out green at every joint, tier above tier, each tier resembling a coronal wreath or an ancient crown, with the rays turned outward; and we see atop what may be either large spikes or catkins.
"What strange forms of vegetable life appear in the forests behind ! Can that be a club-moss that raises its slender height for more than fifty feet from the soil ? Or can these tall, palm-like trees be actual ferns, and these spreading branches mere fronds ? And then these gigantic reeds ! are they not mere varieties of the common horsetail of our bogs and morasses, magnified some sixty or a hundred times ?' Have we arrived at some such country as the continent visited by Gulliver, in which he found thickets of weeds and grass tall as woods of twenty years' growth, and lost himself amid a forest of corn fifty feet in height? " The lesser vegetation of our own country, its reeds, mosses, and ferns, seem here as if viewed through a microscope : the dwarfs have sprung up into giants, and yet there appears to be no proportional increase in size among what are unequivocally its trees. Yonder is a group of what seem to be pines, —tall and bulky, it is true, but neither taller nor bulkier than the pines of Norway or America ; and the club-moss behind shoots up its green, hairy arms, loaded with what seem catkins, above their topmost cones.
"But what monster of the vegetable world comes floating down the stream, now circling round in eddies, now dancing on the ripple, now shooting down the rapid ? It resembles a gigantic star-fish, or an immense coach-wheel divested of its rim.* There is a green, dome-like mass in the
centre, that corresponds to the nave of the wheel or the body of the star fish ; and the boughs shoot out horizontally from every side, like the spokes of the nave, or rays from the central body. The diameter considerably exceeds forty feet ; the branches, originally of a deep green, are assuming the golden tinge of decay ; the cylindrical and hollow leaves stand out thick on every side, like prickles of the wild rose on the red, fleshy, lance like shoots of a year's growth, that will be covered two seasons hence with flowers and fruit. That strangely-formed organism presents no existing type among all the numerous families of the vegetable kingdom.
" There is an amazing luxuriance of growth all around us.. Scarce can the current make its way through the thickets of aquatic plants that rise thick from the muddy bottom ; and though the sunshine falls bright on the upper boughs of the tangled forest beyond, not a ray penetrates the more than twilight gloom that bioods over the marshy platform below.
"The rank steam of decaying' vegetation forms a thick blue haze, that partially obscures the underwood. Deadly lakes of carbonic acid gas have accumulated in all the hollows. There is a silence all around, uninter rupted save by the sudden splash of some reptile-fish that has risen to the surface in pursuit of its prey, or when a sudden breeze stirs the hot air and shakes the fronds of the giant ferns or the catkins of the reeds.
" The wide continent before us is a continent devoid of animal life, save that its pools and rivers abound in fish and mollusca, and that millions and tens of millions of the infusoria tribes swarm in the bogs and marshes. Here and there, too, an insect of strange form flutters among the leaves. It is more than probable that no creature furnished with lungs of the more perfect construction could have breathed the atmosphere of this early period and have lived."* The above description by Hugh Miller is perhaps the best we have of the form and character of the ancient coal But the late attempt to make our mineral coal the product exclusively of an arborescent flora is not consistent with the facts or the nature of things; and we are forced to return to the marine flora as part of the formation, before we can recon cile all the coincidents of our fossil vegetation to the production of coal.