Ancient Plants Being a Simple Account of the past Vegetation of the Earth and of the Recent Important Discoveries Made in This Realm of Nature

In the stupendous pageant of living things which moves through creation, the plants have a place unique and vitally important. Yet so quietly and so slowly do they live and move...

The more recent history of the higher Gymnosperms, in the Upper Cretaceous and Tertiary periods, much resembles that of the flowering plants as sketched in the previous chapter....

Of the rocks which form the solid earth of to-day, a very large proportion have been built up from the deposits at the bottom of ancient oceans and lakes. The earth is very old,...

Some of the many forms which are taken by fossil plants were shortly described in the last chapter, but the most important of all, namely coal, must now be considered. Of the fo...

The individual plants of the Coal Measure period differed entirely from those now living; they were more than merely distinct species, for in the main even the families were lar...

To attempt any discussion of the _causes_ of evolution is far beyond the scope of the present work. At present we must accept life as we find it, endowed with an endless capacit...

The present-day members of this family are not at all impressive, and in their lowliness may well be overlooked by one who is not interested in unpretending plants. The fresh gr...

Unfortunately the records in the rocks do not go back so far as to touch what must have been the most interesting period in the history of the ferns, namely, the point where the...

In comparison with the other groups of plants the flowering families are of recent origin, yet in the sense in which the word is usually used they are ancient indeed, and the ea...

We have seen in the last chapter that the main morphological divisions, roots, stems, leaves, and fructifications, were as distinct in the Coal Measure period as they are now. T...

In the plant world of to-day there are many families including immense numbers of species whose organization is simpler than that of the groups hitherto considered. Taken all to...

This group consists entirely of plants which are extinct, and which were in the height of their development in the Coal Measure period. As a group they are the most recently dis...

This fascinating family is known only from the fossils, and is so remote in its organization from any common living forms that it may perhaps be a little difficult for those who...

The land which to-day appears so firm and unchanging has been under the sea many times, and in many different ways has been united to other land masses to form continents. At ea...

The group to which _Sphenophyllum_ belongs is of considerable interest and importance, and is, further, one of those extinct families whose very existence would never have been...

The horsetails of to-day all belong to the one genus, _Equisetum_, among the different species of which there is a remarkably close similarity. Most of the species love swampy l...

The lore of the plants which have successively clothed this ancient earth during the thousands of centuries before men appeared is generally ignored or tossed on one side with a...

Life has played its important part on the earth for countless series of years, of the length of whose periods no one has any exact knowledge. Many guesses have been made, and ma...

The group of the _Cycadales_, which has a systematic value equivalent to the _Ginkgoales_, contains a much larger variety of genera and species than does the latter. There are s...

but we may take it on the whole that the fossils we shall have to deal with and that give important evidence, are those of the land which had drifted out to sea, in the many cas...

The newer Mesozoic or Upper Cretaceous period represents a relatively deep sea area over England, and the rocks then formed are now known as the chalk, which was all deposited u...