Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 11, 2025
But that we should do so no more follows than that we should envy those geological ages when the club-mosses were of the size of forest-trees, and the frogs as big as oxen. There are many advantages to be had in the forests of the Amazon and the interior of Borneo, inexhaustible fertility, endless water-power, but no one thinks of going there to live. No age is without its attractions.
The coal-period was called by Adolphe Brongniart the age of Acrogens, so great appears to have been the numerical preponderance of flowerless or cryptogamic plants of the families of ferns, club-mosses, and horse-tails.
But we are also able to examine the texture itself of the various coals by submitting extremely thin slices to a strong light under the microscope, and are thus enabled to decide whether the particular coal we are examining is formed of conifers, horse-tails, club-mosses, or ferns, or whether it consists simply of the accumulated sheddings of all, or perhaps, as in some instances, of innumerable spores.
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 modern steam-engine, and all the prodigious trees and branches of modern industry which have grown out of this.
Thus, the singular conclusion is forced upon us, that the greater and the smaller sacs of the "Better-Bed" and other coals, in which the primitive structure is well preserved, are simply the sporangia and spores of certain plants, many of which were closely allied to the existing club-mosses.
These were ideal conditions for the primitive vegetation, and it spread over the swamps with great vigour. To say that the Coal-forests were masses of Ferns, Horsetails, and Club-mosses is a lifeless and misleading expression.
The living club-mosses are, for the most part, insignificant and creeping herbs, which, superficially, very closely resemble true mosses, and none of them reach more than two or three feet in height.
The great Cryptogams of the Carboniferous world the giant Club-mosses and their kindred have been slain by the long period of cold and drought. On the other hand, there is as yet apart from the Conifers no trace of the familiar trees and flowers and grasses of the later world. The vast majority of the plants are of the cycad type.
Ferns, generally of a primitive and generalised character, abound, and include the ferns such as we find in warm countries to-day. Horsetails and Club-mosses already grow into forest-trees. There are even seed-bearing ferns, which give promise of the higher plants to come, but as yet nothing approaching our flower and fruit-bearing trees has appeared.
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.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking