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Updated: June 1, 2025
Let us suppose that one of the stupid, salamander-like Labyrinthodonts, which pottered, with much belly and little leg, like Falstaff in his old age, among the coal-forests, could have had thinking power enough in his small brain to reflect upon the showers of spores which kept on falling through years and centuries, while perhaps not one in ten million fulfilled its apparent purpose, and reproduced the organism which gave it birth: surely he might have been excused for moralizing upon the thoughtless and wanton extravagance which Nature displayed in her operations.
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.
Cold winds blow over it from the new mountains; probably vast regions of it are swept by icy blasts from the glaciated lands. As these conditions advance in the Permian period, the forests wither and shrink. Of the extraordinarily mixed vegetation which we found in the Coal-forests some few types are fitted to meet the severe conditions.
By-and-by, however, when the flowering plants came in, these began to crowd out the old giants of the coal-forests, so that they dwindled and dwindled from century to century till their great-great- grandchildren, thousands of generations after, only lift up their tiny heads in marshes and on heaths, and tell us that they were big once upon a time.
The few that remain belong especially to the series of primitive insects, insects exceedingly limited in their industrial powers and subject to very summary metamorphoses, if to any at all. In my district, in the front rank of those entomological anomalies which remind us of the denizens of the old coal-forests, stand the Mantidae, including the Praying Mantis, so curious in habits and structure.
This has proved to be an exaggeration, but Professor Chamberlin seems to fall into an exaggeration on the other side when he says that 300 out of 10,000 species survived. For instance, of the enormous plant-population of the Coal-forests, comprising many thousands of species, only fifty species survived unchanged in the Permian.
The Permian cold which, however, is universally admitted is more or less entangled in that controversy; the Cretaceous cold has no connection with it. Whatever excess of carbon-dioxide there may have been in the early atmosphere was cleared by the Coal-forests. We must set aside all these theories in explaining the present facts.
More than a thousand species of insects, and nearly a hundred species of spiders and fifty of myriapods, are found in the remains of the Coal-forests. From the evolutionary point of view these new classes are as obscure in their origin, yet as manifestly undergoing evolution when they do fully appear, as the earlier classes we have considered.
Now this little Selaginella is of all living plants the one most like some of the gigantic trees of the coal-forests. These trees are called by botanists Lepidodendrons, or scaly trees; there are numbers of them in all coal-mines, and one trunk has been found 49 feet long. Their branches were divided in a curious forked manner and bore cones at the ends.
Now we know that there were plenty of ferns and of large Calamites growing thickly together in the coal-forests, for we find their remains everywhere in the clay, so we can easily picture to ourselves how the dense jungle formed by these plants would fringe the coal-swamp, as the present plants do the Great Dismal Swamp, and would keep out all earthy matter, so that year after year the plants would die and form a thick bed of peat, afterwards to become coal.
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