The Testimony of the Rocks or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed. Hugh Miller

There occurs, however, just beyond the first group of club mosses—a remarkable exception in a solitary pine—the advance guard of one of the ancient forests of the country, which may be seen far in the background, clothing with its shaggy covering of deep green the lower hill-slopes. And as we found in the Thallogens of that littoral zone over which we have just passed, representatives of the marine flora of the Silurian System, from the first appearance of organisms in its nether beds, to its bone-bed of the Upper Ludlow rocks, in which the Lycopodites first appear, so in the Acrogens of that moor, with its solitary coniferous tree, we may recognize an equally striking representative of the terrestrial flora which existed during the deposition of these Ludlow rocks, and of the various formations of the Old Red Sandstone, Lower, Middle, and Upper.

      Fig. 10.

       PINUS SYLVESTRIS. (Scotch Fir.)

Fig. 11. CALAMITE? Of the Lower Old Red Sandstone. Shetland. (One eighth nat. size.)

Fig. 12. LYCOPODITE? Of the Lower Old Red Sandstone. Thurso. (Mag. two diameters.)

      In the upper beds of the Upper Silurian, as has been already remarked, Lycopodites are the only terrestrial plants yet found. In the Lower Old Red Sandstone we find added to these, with Thallogens that bear at least the same general character as in the system beneath, minute ferns, and a greatly larger plant, allied to the horse tails. The Old Red flora seems to have been prevailingly an acrogenic flora; and yet with almost its first beginnings—contemporary with at least the earlier fossils of the system in Scotland, we find a true polycotyledonous tree, not lower in the scale than the araucarites of the Coal Measures—which in structure it greatly resembles—or than the pines or cedars of our own times (see Fig. 3). In the Middle Old Red Sandstone there occurs, with plants representative apparently of the ferns and their allies, a somewhat equivocal and doubtful organism, which may have been the panicle or compound fruit of some aquatic rush; while in the Upper Old Red, just ere the gorgeous flora of the Coal Measures began to be, there existed in considerable abundance a stately fern, the Cyclopteris Hibernicus (see Fig. 2), of mayhap not smaller proportions than our monarch of the British ferns, Osmunda regalis, associated with a peculiar lepidodendron, and what seems to be a lepidostrobus—possibly the fructiferous spike or cone of the latter, mingled with carbonaceous stems, which, in the simplicity of their texture, and their abundance, give evidence of a low but not scanty vegetation. Ere passing to the luxuriant carboniferous flora, I shall make but one other remark. The existing plants whence we derive our analogies in dealing with the vegetation of this early period, contribute but little, if at all, to the support of animal life. The ferns and their allies remain untouched by the grazing animals. Our native club mosses, though once used in medicine, are positively deleterious; the horse tails, though harmless, so abound in silex, which wraps them round with a cuticle of stone, that they are rarely cropped by cattle; while the thickets of fern which cover our hill-sides, and seem so temptingly rich and green in their season, scarce support the existence of a single creature, and remain untouched in stem and leaf, from their first appearance in spring, until they droop and wither under the frosts of early winter. Even the insects that infest the herbaria of the botanist almost never injure his ferns. Nor are our resin-producing conifers, though they nourish a few beetles, favorites with the herbivorous tribes in a much greater degree. Judging from all we yet know, the earliest terrestrial flora may have covered the dry land with its mantle of cheerful green, and served its general purposes, chemical and others, in the well-balanced economy of nature; but the herb-eating animals would have fared but ill even where it throve most luxuriantly; and it seems to harmonize with the fact of its non-edible character, that up to the present time we know not that a single herbivorous animal lived among its shades. From all that appears, it may be inferred that it had not to serve the purposes of the floras of the passing time, in which, according to the poet,

      "The world's bread depends on the shooting of a seed."

Fig. 13. Fern? of Lower Old Red Sandstone. Orkney. (Nat. Size.)

      The flora of the Coal Measures was the richest and most luxuriant, in at least individual productions, with which the fossil botanist has formed any acquaintance. Never before or since did our planet bear so rank a vegetation as that of which the numerous coal seams and inflammable shales of the carboniferous period form but a portion of the remains—the portion spared, in the first instance, by dissipation and decay, and in the second by the denuding agencies. Almost all our coal—the stored up fuel of a world—forms but a comparatively small part of the produce of this wonderful flora. Amid much that was so strange and antique of type in its productions as to set the analogies of the botanist at fault, there occurred one solitary order, not a few of whose species closely resembled their cogeners of the present time. I refer, of course, to its ferns. And these seem to have formed no small proportion of the entire flora of the period. Francis estimates the recent dorsiferous ferns of Great Britain at thirty-five species, and the species of all the other genera at six more—forty-one species in all; and as the flowering plants of the country do not fall short of fourteen hundred species, the ferns bear to them the rather small proportion of about one to thirty-five; whereas of the British Coal Measure flora, in which we do not yet reckon quite three hundred species of plants, about a hundred and twenty were ferns. Three sevenths of the entire carboniferous flora of Britain belonged to this familiar class; and for about fifty species more we can discover no nearer analogies than those which connect them with the fern allies. And if with the British Coal Measure we include those also of the Continent of America, we shall find the proportions in favor of the ferns still greater. The number of carboniferous plants hitherto described amounts, says M. Ad. Brogniart, to about five hundred, and of these two hundred and fifty—one half of the whole—were ferns.

Fig. 14.	Fig. 15.	Fig. 16.
Fig. 17.	Fig. 18.	Fig. 19.
FERNS OF THE COAL MEASURES.[6]

Fig. 20. ALTINGIA EXCELSA. Norfolk Island Pine. (Young Specimen.)

      Rising in the scale from the lower to the higher vegetable forms of the system—from its ferns to its trees—we find great conifers—so great that they must have raised their heads more than a hundred feet over the soil; and such was their abundance in this neighborhood, that one can scarce examine a fragment of coal beside one's household fire that is not charged with their carbonized remains. Though marked by certain peculiarities of structure, they bore, as is shown by the fossil trunks of Granton and Craigleith, the familiar outlines of true coniferous trees; and would mayhap have differed no more in appearance from their