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Updated: May 2, 2025
I take it to be certain that Labyrinthodont Amphibia existed in the distributional province which included the dry land depressed during the Carboniferous epoch; and I conceive that, in some other distributional provinces of that day, which remained in the condition of stationary or of increasing dry land, the various types of the terrestrial Sauropsida and of the Mammalia were gradually developing.
In each of the two countries a very similar series of geological changes has occurred at two distinct epochs in Wexford, before the Devonian strata were deposited; in Cornwall, after the Carboniferous epoch.
The earth had been by no means all swamp in the Carboniferous age. The new types were even then developing in the cooler and drier localities. But their hour has come, and there is great devastation among the lower plant population of the earth. It follows at once that there would be, on land, an equal devastation and a similar selection in the animal world.
The conversion of the vegetation of the carboniferous ages into coal was accompanied by a gradual loss of hydrogen and a consequent increase in the percentage of carbon. It is this change that has added to the density of the substance and makes the greater value of coal as fuel. There is little doubt now as to the method by which this woody material of the past has been converted into coal.
The three regions just mentioned include the chief Carboniferous coal fields of North America. We can hardly estimate the value of these great stores of fossil fuel to an industrial civilization.
The age of the Alleghany chain is not yet positively determined, but it was probably raised at the close of the Carboniferous epoch. Up to that time, only the Laurentian Hills, the northern side of that mountainous triangle which now makes the skeleton, as it were, of the United States, existed.
Hermann von Meyer, again, to whose luminous researches we are indebted for our present large knowledge of the organisation of the older Labyrinthodonts, has proved that the Carboniferous Archegosaurus had very imperfectly developed vertebral centra, while the Triassic Mastodonsaurus had the same parts completely ossified.
In the East, in England, and in other parts of Europe, vast marshes existed in this period, and the rank vegetation of these marshy areas formed the coal-beds, with which the Carboniferous there abounds.
The other, Archaeocidaris, represents, in like manner, the Cidaris of the present seas. Productus semireticulatus, Martin, sp. Spirifera trigonalis, Martin, sp. Mountain Limestone. Spirifera glabra, Martin, sp. The British Carboniferous mollusca enumerated by Mr. Etheridge comprise 653 species referable to 86 genera, occurring chiefly in the Mountain Limestone.
The oldest group of plants with which we are well acquainted is that of whose remains coal is constituted; and as far as they can be identified, the carboniferous plants are ferns, or club-mosses, or Coniferae, in many cases generically identical with those now living! Among animals, instances of the same kind may be found in every sub-kingdom.
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