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The division of Vascular plants includes the far larger proportion of vegetation, both living and fossil, and these plants are built up of vessels and tissues of various shapes and character. All plants are divided into Cryptogams, or Flowerless, such as mosses, ferns, equisetums, and Phanerogams, or Flowering.
Here and there I found a few phanerogams, some pale-coloured mosses, and especially tussock grass in such abundance that numerous herds of cattle might be fed upon the island. On the 12th November the Halbrane sailed once more, and having doubled Charlotte Point at the extremity of Royal Bay, she headed in the direction of the Sandwich Islands, four hundred miles from thence.
As we saw, the Primary Era was predominantly the age of Cryptogams; the later periods witness the rise and supremacy of the Phanerogams. But these in turn are broadly divided into a less advanced group, the Gymnosperms, and a more advanced group, the Angiosperms or flowering plants.
Everywhere were brilliant white summits. There were no lakes, but glaciers descending ten thousand feet towards the base. There was no herbage, only a few phanerogams on the limit of vegetable life. Down on the lower flanks of the range were splendid forests of pines and cedars.
Many of these he said were innocent guests of their host, but many guest plants were death to their host. This is for the benefit of those who say that the Gemiasmas are innocent plants and do no harm. All plants, phanerogams or cryptogams, can be divided into nocent or innocent, etc., etc.
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 breaks which formerly separated our groups from one another, as animals from plants, vertebrates from invertebrates, cryptogams from phanerogams, have either been filled up, or shown to have no theoretical significance.
That is to say, the marked difference of purpose seen in the leaves, stamens, seeds, etc., of the phanerogams or flowering plants is absent here, and the structures carrying on the operations of nutrition and those of reproduction are so commingled, conjoined, and in some cases identified, that a knowledge of the microscopic anatomy is indispensable even to the roughest conception of the natural history of these plants; besides, we find these plants so simple that we can see through and through them while living in a natural condition, and by means of the microscope penetrate to mysteries of organism, either altogether inaccessible, or only to be attained by disturbing and destructive dissection, in the so called higher 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.
Though not poor at any given place, it appears so if the space occupied by Russia be taken into account, only 3,300 species of phanerogams and ferns being known. Four great regions may be distinguished: the Arctic, the Forest, the Steppe, and the Circum-Mediterranean.
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