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Updated: June 11, 2025
I took leave of my companions at Profile Lake, they having planned an all-day excursion beyond, and started homeward by myself. Yes, he was again singing, this time not far from the road, in a moderately thick growth of small trees, under which the ground was carpeted with club-mosses, dog-tooth violets, clintonia, linnæa, and similar plants.
The spores of the living club-mosses contain so much resinous matter that they are now largely used in the making of fireworks, and upon the presence of this altered resinous matter in coal depends its capability of providing a good blazing coal.
The specimens found in the muschelkalk are allied to the crocodile and lizard tribes of the present day, but in the latter instance are upon a scale of magnitude as much superior to present forms as the lepidodendron of the coal era was superior to the dwarf club-mosses of our time. These saurians also combine some peculiarities of structure of a most extraordinary character.
Plants and animals seem to have appeared nearly at the same time, and at first in the form of the very lowest organisms. The earliest plants found by geology belong also to the lowest stage of the vegetable kingdom; they are the algæ. They are followed again by higher cryptogamous plants, especially ferns and club-mosses.
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?
This is that which includes the fossil representatives of the Lycopodiums, or Club-mosses, and which goes to make up in some coals as much as two-thirds of the whole mass. Everyone is more or less familiar with some of the living Lycopodiums, those delicate little fern-like mosses which are to be found in many a home.
One of the domes was so small, that we were obliged to stand up by turn to examine its beauties; but in the others we all stood together. On every side were branching clusters of ice in the form of club-mosses, with here and there varicose veins of clear ice, and pinnacles of the prismatic structure, with limpid crockets and finials.
These Calamites probably rose in dense thickets from the borders of the lakes, their stumpy leaves spreading in whorls at every joint in their hollow stems. Another extinct tree, the Cordaites, rivalled the Horsetails and Club-mosses in height, and its showers of long and extraordinary leaves, six feet long and six inches in width, pointed to the higher plant world that was to come.
We have somewhat obscure and disputed traces of ferns in the Ordovician, and, as they and the Horsetails and Club-mosses are well developed in the Devonian, we may assume that some of the sea-weeds had become adapted to life on land, and evolved into the early forms of the ferns, at least in the Cambrian period.
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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