Notice of some remarks by the late Mr. Hugh Miller, author of The testimony of the rocks, The old red sandstone, &c. &c.

Date:
1857
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Notice of some remarks by the late Mr. Hugh Miller, author of The testimony of the rocks, The old red sandstone, &c. &c. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    render it more remarkable as a scene of life tlian any of the divisions -whicli followed. That which chiefly distinguished the Palaeozoic from the Secondary and Tertiary periods was its gor- geous flora.* It was emphatically the period of plants,— of herbs yielding seed after their kind. In no other age did the world ever witness such a flora: the youth of the earth was pe- culiarly a green and umbrageous youth,—a youth of dusk and tangled forests, of huge pines and stately araucarians, of the reed-like calamite, the tall tree-fern, the sculptured sigillaria, and the hirsute lepidodendron. Wherever dry land, or shallow lake, or running stream appeared, from where Melville Island now spreads out its ice wastes under the star of the pole, to where the arid plains of Australia lie solitary beneath the bright cross of the south, a rank and luxuriant herbage cumbered every footbreadth of the dank and steaming soil; and even to distant planets our earth must have shone through the enveloping cloud with a green and delicate ray. Of this extraordinary age of plants we have our cheerful remembrancers and witnesses in the flames that roar in our chimneys when we pile up the winter fire,—in the brilliant gas that now casts its light on this great assemblage, and that lightens up the streets and lanes of this vast city,—in the glowing furnaces that smelt our metals, and give moving power to our ponderous engines,—in the long dusky trains that, with shriek and snort, speed dart-like athwart our landscapes,—and in the great cloud-enveloped vessels that darken the lower reaches of your noble river, and rush in foam over ocean and sea. The geologic evidence is so complete as to be patent to all, that the first great period of organized being was, as described in the Mosaic record, peculiarly a period of herbs and trees, yielding seed after their kind. [* The elementary books upon geology show that the limits of the palaeozoic system, or division, (t. e., of the most ancient series of geological periods of which there remain evidences of organic life,) have been chiefly determined by peculiarities of animal forms ; and that vegetable types have only a secondarj- place in this respect. This and the following notesare by the editor.—W. P. F.