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Updated: June 16, 2025
Probably the giant salamander of modern Japan affords the best suggestion of the large and primitive salamanders of the Coal-forest, while the Caecilia snake-like Amphibia with scaly skins, which live underground in South America may not impossibly be degenerate survivors of the curious Aistopods.
There seems to have been no culminating point in the series when the uplifted earth shivered in a mantle of ice and snow. I drew a fanciful parallel between the three revolutions which have quickened the earth since the sluggish days of the Coal-forest and the three revolutionary movements which have changed the life of modern Europe.
We saw that at one time the evolutionist was puzzled by the clean division of animals into Invertebrate and Vertebrate, and the sudden appearance of the backbone in the chronicle: he was just as much puzzled by the sharp division of our plants into Cryptogams and Phanerogams, and the sudden appearance of the latter on the earth during the Coal-forest period.
The botanist finds even more difficulty than the zoologist in drawing up the pedigrees of his plants, but the general features of the larger groups which he finds in succession in the chronicle of the earth point very decisively to evolution. The seed-bearing ferns of the Coal-forest point upward to the later stage, and downward to a common origin with the ordinary spore-bearing ferns.
Instead of the Coal-forest being a vast assemblage of Cryptogams, upon which the higher type of the Phanerogam is going suddenly to descend from the clouds, it is, to a very great extent, a world of plants that are struggling upward, along many paths, to the higher level.
You will see the Sigillarias on the left-hand side of the coal-forest picture, having those curious tufts of leaves springing out of them at the top. Their stems make up a great deal of the coal, and the bark of their trunks is often found in the clays above, squeezed flat in lengths of 30, 60, or 70 feet.
Survivors of the old order linger in the warmer valleys, as one may see to-day tree-ferns lingering in nooks of southern regions while an Antarctic wind is whistling on the hills above them; but over the broad earth the luscious pasturage of the Coal-forest has changed into what is comparatively a cold desert. We must not, of course, imagine too abrupt a change.
By the middle of the Coal-forest period there was a very large and varied animal population on the land. Like the plants, moreover, these animals were of an intermediate and advancing nature. No bird or butterfly yet flits from tree to tree; no mammal rears its young in the shelter of the ferns.
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