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Updated: May 2, 2025
Others remained at the Alga-level, and grew in great thickets along the sea bottoms, no doubt rivalling or surpassing the giant sea-weeds, sometimes 400 feet long, off the American coast to-day. The mosses, the lowest group, are not preserved in the rocks; from the other three classes will come the great forests of the Carboniferous period.
The air was warm with a vaporous warmth, and the stillness was unbroken. Lizards, grasshoppers, and ants were the only living things to be beheld. The scene seemed to belong to the ancient world of the carboniferous period, when the forms of plants were few, and of the fern kind; when there was neither bud nor blossom, nothing but a monotonous extent of leafage, amid which no bird sang.
Hooker, that there are Carboniferous plants which appear to be generically identical with some now living; that the cone of the Oolitic Araucaria is hardly distinguishable from that of an existing species; that a true Pinus appears in the Purbecks and a Juglans in the Chalk; while, from the Bagshot Sands, a Banksia, the wood of which is not distinguishable from that of species now living in Australia, had been obtained.
The blastoids became more abundant in the Devonian, culminated in the Carboniferous, and disappeared at the end of the Paleozoic. The great eurypterids some of which were five or six feet in length and the cephalopods were still masters of the seas. Fishes were as yet few and small; trilobites and graptolites had now passed their prime and had diminished greatly in numbers.
The disturbances in the case here adverted to occurred between the Carboniferous period and that of the Trias, and this interval is so vast that they may have occupied a great lapse of time, during which their parallelism was always preserved.
It is divided into four long periods, the Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, and Permian. The collective depth of these strata is put at 40,000 to 45,000 feet. In any case, the paleozoic age, taken as a whole, was much shorter than the preceding and much longer than the subsequent periods.
The vegetation of the carboniferous age was dependent upon the nitrogen fixed by the bacteria, and to these organisms also do we owe the fact that this vegetation was stored for us in the rocks. Perhaps the most universally known fact in regard to bacteria is that they are the cause of disease. It is this fact that has made them objects of such wide interest.
Although reptiles appeared first in the period known as the Carboniferous Age, or age of plant life, they did not attain their greatest development until Jurassic and Cretaceous times, when many were of prodigious size and ruled the world. The gigantic ichthyosaurs, mesosaurs, and dinosaurs held dominion over the sea and land, and the monster flying reptile, the pterodactyl, over the air.
The five strangers stood near their vessel, conversing in low tones and enjoying the sensation of solid ground beneath their feet. After a few minutes DuQuesne remarked: "This is undoubtedly a newer planet than ours. I should say that it was in the Carboniferous age. Aren't those trees like those in the coal-measures, Seaton?"
"Hear, hear!" "About their origin and their destiny." While the equator, and even the tropics of Cancer and of Capricorn, were still too boiling hot to support life, up here in the Arctic regions there was a carboniferous era goin' on " "Where's the coal, then?" sneered Potts. "Tropical forests grew where there are glayshers now, and elephants and mastodons began life here."
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