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But the fine particles of blown sand which are scattered through it, show that it must have accumulated, subaërially, upon the surface of a soil covered by a forest of cryptogamous plants, probably tree-ferns.
As most of the aquatic plants are cryptogamous, or producing by spores, and not by flowers, it seems probable that the evolution of carbonic acid and heat is much less in degree in them, and therefore less in the water than in the air.
Then two rows of four-o'clocks became visible to the naked eye. They are cryptogamous, it seems. Botanists have hitherto classed them among the Phaenogamia. A sweet-pea and a china-aster dawdled up just in time to get frost-bitten. "Et praeterea nihil." I tended my seeds with assiduous care. My devotion was unwearied. I was a very slave to their caprices.
Debey estimates the number of species as amounting to more than two hundred, of which sixty-seven are cryptogamous, chiefly ferns, twenty species of which can be well determined, most of them being in fructification. The scars on the bark of one or two are supposed to indicate tree-ferns.
Orange trees loaded with flowers, myrtles, and cypress trees encircle the chapels reared to devotion on the isolated hills. The divisions of landed property are marked by hedges formed of the agave and the cactus. An innumerable quantity of cryptogamous plants, among which ferns are the most predominant, cover the walls, and are moistened by small springs of limpid water.
The whole vegetable kingdom exhibits a constant struggle between progression and retrogression. Of course, the great lines of the general pedigree are due to progression, many single steps in this direction leading together to the great superiority of the flowering plants over their cryptogamous ancestors.
Paganel discovered in the dry bed of a creek, a plant whose excellent properties had been frequently described by one of his colleagues in the Geographical Society. It was the NARDOU, a cryptogamous plant of the family Marsilacea, and the same which kept Burke and King alive in the deserts of the interior.
This and the Cyathea excelsa of the Mauritius, are the most majestic of all the fern-trees described by botanists. The total number of these gigantic cryptogamous plants amounts at present to 25 species, that of the palm-trees to 80. We observed that the fern-trees are in general much more rare than the palm-trees. Nature has confined them to temperate, moist, and shady places.
We could scarcely persuade ourselves that we were elevated less than one hundred toises above the level of the sea, in the fifth degree of latitude, in the centre of the torrid zone, which has so long been thought to be destitute of cryptogamous plants. The mean temperature of this shady and humid spot probably exceeds twenty-six degrees of the centigrade thermometer.
A small selection of the purple or red varieties may perhaps be introduced and successfully cultivated at a later day, but they are very delicate; while the olives and browns are pretty sure to die and corrupt the water. It must be remembered, too, that the Algae are cryptogamous, and bear no visible flowers to delight the eye or fancy.
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