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Updated: July 11, 2025
In one of these club-mosses called Selaginella, the cases near the bottom of the cone contain large spores, while those near the top contain a powdery dust. These spores are full of resin, and they are collected on the Continent for making artificial lightning in the theatres, because they flare when lighted.
Still further back the characters, afterwards separated in the club-mosses, mare's-tails, and ferns, were united in the rhizocarps, or, as some prefer to call them, the heterosporous filicinae."
In the vegetable world this process, in many cases, at least, has been reversed, and the huge treelike club-mosses and horsetails of Carboniferous times have dwindled in our time to very insignificant herbaceous forms. Animals of overweening size are handicapped in many ways, so that nature in most cases finally abandons the gigantic and sticks to the medium and the small.
Fragments of others, found in the same shale, indicate, by the size of the rhomboidal scars which cover them, a still greater magnitude. The living club-mosses, of which there are about 200 species, are most abundant in tropical climates. Lepidostrobus ornatus, Brong. Shropshire. a.
What strange trees are here! No oaks, no elms, or ash, or chestnut no trees that we ever saw before. It looks as if the plants of a boggy meadow had shot up in a single night to a height of 60 or 70 feet, and we were walking among the stalks a gigantic meadow of ferns, reeds, grasses, and club-mosses.
The Lepidodendron, its fellow monarch of the forest, branched at the summit, and terminated in clusters of its stiff, needle-like leaves, six' or seven inches long, like enormous exaggerations of the little cones at the ends of our Club-mosses to-day.
A profoundly destructive influence has fallen on the earth, and converted its rich green forests, in which the mighty Club-mosses had reared their crowns above a sea of waving ferns, into severe and poverty-stricken deserts. No botanist hesitates to say that it is the coming of a cold, dry climate that has thus changed the face of the earth. The geologist finds more direct evidence.
Manufactures give place to agriculture and pasture, and not ten men can live where now ten thousand are amply supported. Thus, all this abundant wealth of money and of vivid life is Nature's interest upon her investment in club-mosses, and the like, so long ago. But what becomes of the coal which is burnt in yielding this interest?
The English people grew into a powerful nation, and Nature still waited for a full return of the capital she had invested in the ancient club-mosses. The eighteenth century arrived, and with it James Watt. The brain of that man was the spore out of which was developed the steam-engine, and all the prodigious trees and branches of modern industry which have grown out of this.
A similar fortune was experienced by the ferns and club-mosses which formed whole forests in the carboniferous period. Other groups which once played a great rôle, are now wholly extinct; for instance, the trilobites of the primary, the sauria of the secondary, the nummulites of the tertiary periods.
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