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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.
Dense forests of tree ferns throve in moist regions, and canebrakes of horsetails of modern type, but with stems reaching four inches in thickness, bordered the lagoons and marshes. Cycads were exceedingly abundant.
His tightly fitting dark green trousers, tall boots, and jacket of white cloth trimmed with yellow set off his muscular form to great advantage. A comrade stood by, shaking the buntchuk, an ornamental combination of brass half-moons, gay horsetails, and bells, the Turkish staff of command, which is carried as a special privilege by several Russian cavalry regiments.
It contains sixteen thousand weapons and suits of armor, including those plundered from the Turks, when John Sobieski conquered them and relieved Vienna from the siege. Besides a great number of sabres, lances and horsetails, there is the blood-red banner of the Grand Vizier, as well as his skull and shroud, which is covered with sentences from the Koran.
Austin, having shown that they cannot have supported either hanging lamps or the covering of the shrine, believes to have upheld flags, horsetails, etc., which formed the trophy of which the gilded crescent was the centre. We know that Becket received the title of St. Thomas Acrensis owing to his close connection with the knights of the Hospital of St. John at Acre.
The Italian officer is addicted to cock feathers and horsetails on his helmet, to bits of yellow and blue let into his clothes, to tufts of red and green hung on him in unexpected and unaccountable spots.
From Popery to Puritanism; from Puritanism back towards Popery; from Imperialism to Republicanism, and back towards Imperialism again; from Gothic architecture to Palladian, and from Palladian back to Gothic; from hooped petticoats to drapery of the scantiest, and from that backwards to the multitudinous crinoline; from crying up the science of arms to crying it down, and back; from the schoolboy telling you that his companion Brown is the jolliest fellow, to the schoolboy telling you that his companion Brown is a beast, and back again; from very high carriages to very low ones and back; from very short horsetails to very long ones and back again the pendulum swings.
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.
That is what we burn to-day, the trunks of the wheel-jointed swamp trees. But their youngest great-grandchild is still with us, and shows, in its small way, what its great ancestors were like. You will find it along some railway bank, or in any damp woods. Country people who know it, call it Joint Grass or Horsetails; the books call it Equisetum. The drawing will show you what to look for.
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.
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