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And, although ancient club-mosses have been found in a fossilised condition at least forty-nine feet high, the spores are no larger than those of our miniature club-mosses of the present day. The spores are more or less composed of pure bitumen, and the bituminous nature of the coal depends largely on the presence or absence of these microscopic bodies in it.
But these are the very matters with which Nature supplied the club-mosses which made the coal. She is paid back principal and interest at the same time; and she straightway invests the carbonic acid, the water, and the ammonia in new forms of life, feeding with them the plants that now live. Thrifty Nature! Surely no prodigal, but most notable of housekeepers!
With much sagacity, Professor Morris divined the real nature of these bodies, and boldly affirmed them to be the spore-cases of a plant allied to the living club-mosses. But discovery sometimes makes a long halt; and it is only a few years since Mr. He gave the name of Flemingites gracilis to the plant of which the cones form a part.
Thus, in endeavouring to comprehend the formation of a seam of coal, we must try to picture to ourselves a thick forest, formed for the most part of trees like gigantic club-mosses, mares-tails, and tree ferns, with here and there some that had more resemblance to our existing yews and fir-trees.
Either they were very small and light, like the spores of ferns, fungi, and club-mosses; or they were winged and feathery, like dandelion and thistle-down; or they were the stones of fruits that are eaten by birds, like rose-hips and hawthorn; or they were chaffy grains, enclosed in papery scales, like grasses and sedges, of a kind well adapted to be readily borne on the surface of the water.
But these are the very matters with which Nature supplied the club-mosses which made the coal She is paid back principal and interest at the same time; and she straightway invests the carbonic acid, the water, and the ammonia in new forms of life, feeding with them the plants that now live. Thrifty Nature! Surely no prodigal, but most notable of housekeepers!
We must not forget that it is a well-ascertained fact that in later ages, the minute seed-spores of forest trees were in such abundance as to form important seams of coal in the true carboniferous era, the trees which gave birth to them being now classed amongst the humble cryptogams, the ferns, and club-mosses, &c.
Take, for example, the giant club-mosses and luxuriant tree-ferns nature-printed on shales of the coal age in Britain: and we see in the wild undergrowth of those palæozoic forests ample evidence of a warm and almost West Indian climate among the low basking islets of our northern carboniferous seas.
The first cone also appears on the summit of the stem, like the terminal cone in the Equisetaceae and the Club-Mosses. Thus in certain types of the vegetable, as well as the animal creation of earlier times, there was a continuation of features, afterwards divided and presented in separate groups.
In some strata, as for instance that of the Shropshire coalfield, quantities of elongated cylindrical bodies known as lepidostrobi have been found, which, it was early conjectured, were the fruit of the giant club-mosses about which we have just been speaking.
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