THE
GEOLOGICAL HISTORY OF PLANTS.
CHAPTER I.
PRELIMINARY IDEAS OF GEOLOGICAL CHRONOLOGY AND OF THE CLASSIFICATION OF PLANTS.
The knowledge of fossil plants and of the history of the vegetable kingdom has, until recently, been so fragmentary that it seemed hopeless to attempt a detailed treatment of the subject of this little book. Our stores of knowledge have, however, been rapidly accumulating in recent years, and we have now arrived at a stage when every new discovery serves to render useful and intelligible a vast number of facts previously fragmentary and of uncertain import.
The writer of this work, born in a district rich in fossil plants, began to collect and work at these as a boy, in connection with botanical and geological pursuits. He has thus been engaged in the study of fossil plants for nearly half a century, and, while he has published much on the subject, has endeavoured carefully to keep within the sphere of ascertained facts, and has made it a specialty to collect, as far as possible, what has been published by others. He has also enjoyed opportunities of correspondence or personal intercourse with most of the more eminent workers in the subject. Now, in the evening of his days, he thinks it right to endeavour to place before the world a summary of facts and of his own matured conclusions—feeling, however, that nothing can be final in this matter; and that he can only hope to sketch the present aspect of the subject, and to point the way to new developments, which must go on long after he shall have passed away.
The subject is one which has the disadvantage of presupposing some knowledge of the geological history of the earth, and of the classification and structures of modern plants; and in order that all who may please to read the following pages may be placed, as nearly as possible, on the same level, this introductory chapter will be devoted to a short statement of the general facts of geological chronology, and of the natural divisions of the vegetable kingdom in their relations to that chronology.
The crust of the earth, as we somewhat modestly term that portion of its outer shell which is open to our observation, consists of many beds of rock superimposed on each other, and which must have been deposited successively, beginning with the lowest. This is proved by the structure of the beds themselves, by the markings on their surfaces, and by the remains of animals and plants which they contain; all these appearances indicating that each successive bed must have been the surface before it was covered by the next.
As these beds of rock were mostly formed under water, and of material derived from the waste of land, they are not universal, but occur in those places where there were extensive areas of water receiving detritus from the land. Further, as the distinction of land and water arises primarily from the shrinkage of the mass of the earth, and from the consequent collapse of the crust in some places and ridging of it up in others, it follows that there have, from the earliest geological periods, been deep ocean-basins, ridges of elevated land, and broad plateaus intervening between the ridges, and which were at some times under water, and at other times land, with many intermediate phases. The settlement and crumpling of the crust were not continuous, but took place at intervals; and each such settlement produced not only a ridging up along certain lines, but also an emergence of the plains or plateaus. Thus at all times there have been ridges of folded rock constituting mountain-ranges, flat expansions of continental plateau, sometimes dry and sometimes submerged, and deep ocean-basins, never except in some of their shallower portions elevated into land.
By the study of the successive beds, more especially of those deposited in the times of continental submergence, we obtain a table of geological chronology which expresses the several stages of the formation of the earth’s crust, from that early time when a solid shell first formed on our nascent planet to the present day. By collecting the fossil remains embedded in the several layers and placing these in chronological order, we obtain in like manner histories of animal and plant life parallel to the physical changes indicated by the beds themselves. The facts as to the sequence we obtain from the study of exposures in cliffs, cuttings, quarries, and mines; and by correlating these local sections in a great number of places, we obtain our general table of succession; though it is to be observed that in some single exposures or series of exposures, like those in the great canons of Colorado, or on the coasts of Great Britain, we can often in one locality see nearly the whole sequence of beds. Let us observe here also that, though we can trace these series of deposits over the whole of the surfaces of the continents, yet if the series could be seen in one spot, say in one shaft sunk through the whole thickness of the earth’s crust, this would be sufficient for our purpose, so far as the history of life is concerned.
The evidence is similar to that obtained by Schliemann on the site of Troy, where, in digging through successive layers of débris, he found the objects deposited by successive occupants of the site, from the time of the Roman Empire back to the earliest tribes, whose flint weapons and the ashes of their fires rest on the original surface of the ground.
Let us now tabulate the whole geological succession with the history of animals and plants associated with it:
| ANIMALS. | SYSTEMS OF FORMATIONS. | PLANTS. | ||
| Age of Man and Mammalia. | Kainozoic. |
 |
Modern, Pleistocene, Pliocene, Miocene, Eocene. | Angiosperms and Palms dominant. |
| Age of Reptiles. | Mesozoic. |
|
Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic. | Cycads and Pines dominant. |
| Age of Amphibians and Fishes. Age of Invertebrates. | Palæozoic. |
|
Permian, Carboniferous, Erian, Silurian, Ordovician, Cambrian, Huronian (Upper). | Acrogens and Gymnosperms dominant. |
| Age of Protozoa. | Eozoic. |
| ||