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Updated: May 22, 2025
What more wild and drear is there, even in Indian cosmogonic fable, than that strange carbonigenous era of the globe, whose deposits, in the shape of petrified forests, now keep us warm and cook our food, and whose relics and souvenirs are pressed between the stone leaves of the secondary rock for preservation by the Omnipotent Herbalist?
Such was the vegetation of the carbonigenous era, composed of forms at the bottom of the botanical scale, flowerless, fruitless, but luxuriant and abundant beyond what the most favoured spots on earth can now shew.
At one early age, if there was any dry land at all, it was perhaps enveloped in an atmosphere unfit for the existence of terrestrial animals, and which had to go though some changes before that condition was altered. In the carbonigenous era, dry land seems to have consisted only of clusters of islands, and the temperature was much above what now obtains at the same places.
Between the third and fourth there is, in Germany, another group, called the Muschelkalk, a word expressing a limestone full of shells. The first group, containing the conglomerates already adverted to, seems to have been produced during the time of disturbance which occurred so generally after the carbonigenous era.
We have likewise seen reason for supposing that land animals could not have lived before the carbonigenous era, owing to the great charge of carbonic acid gas presumed to have been contained in the atmosphere down to that time.
The phenomena suggests the time when the sand ultimately formed into these stone slabs, was part of the beach of a sea of the carbonigenous era; when, left wavy by one tide, it was covered over with a thin layer of fresh sand by the next, and so on, precisely as such circumstances might be expected to take place at the present day.
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