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Updated: June 26, 2025
Great masses of lycopods of several species covered the rocks and little round tufts of a dark green plant with feathery foliage dotted the decaying tree trunks. The descent seemed endless, and for more than two hours we descended deeper and deeper into the dampness and darkness.
Add to these the numerous conifers which are there found, and we shall find that a forest in that country may represent to a certain extent the appearance presented by a forest of carboniferous vegetation. The ferns, lycopods, and pines, however, which appear there, it is but fair to add, are mixed with other types allied to more recent forms of vegetation.
It is important to note that some of these gigantic lycopods, which are classed with the CRYPTOGAMS, or flowerless plants, had pith and medullary rays dividing their cylinders into woody wedges. These characters connect them with the PHANEROGAMS, or flowering plants. Like so many of the organisms of the remote past, they were connecting types from which groups now widely separated have diverged.
We can only say that it is probable that the Mosses, Ferns, Lycopods, etc., arose independently from the primitive level. But the higher and more important development is now much clearer. The Coal-forest is not simply a kingdom of Cryptogams. It is a world of aspiring and mingled types.
The Carboniferous was the age of lycopods and amphibians, as the Devonian had been the age of rhizocarps and fishes. The upridging of the Appalachians had begun and a wide continental uplift proved by the absence of Permian deposits over large areas where sedimentation had gone on before opened new lands for settlement to hordes of air-breathing animals.
George Ingram had made a thorough study of coal, or fossil fuel, its formation and value. The coal of the carboniferous age is derived almost entirely from the family of plants called Lycopods, or club mosses, and the ferns, which back in high antiquity attained gigantic size. The microscope has clearly developed this vegetable origin of coal.
These were close allies of the Equiseta or "horsetails," of the present; but they bore characteristics of higher classes in the woody structures of their stems. There were also vast monotonous forests, composed chiefly of trees belonging to the lycopods, and whose nearest relatives to-day are the little club mosses of our eastern woods.
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