ns of Europe, from the Chalk to
the Trias inclusive. In a paper such as the present I can of course do
little more than just indicate a few of the more striking features of
the Scottish flora of the middle Secondary ages. Like that of the period
of the true Coal, it had its numerous coniferous trees. As shown by the
fossil woods of Helmsdale and Eigg, old Oolitic Scotland, like the
Scotland of three centuries ago, must have had its mighty forests of
pine;[54] and in one respect these trees seem to have more nearly
resembled those of the recent pine forests of our country than the trees
of the coniferous forests of the remote Carboniferous era. For while we
scarce ever find a cone associated with the coniferous woods of the Coal
Measures,--Lindley and Hatton never saw but one from all the English
coal fields, and Mr. Alexander Bryson of Edinburgh, only one from all
the coal fields of Scotland,--tree-cones of at least four different
species, more probably of five, are not rare in our Scottish deposits of
the Lias and Oolite. It seems not improbable that in the Carboniferous
genera Pinites, Pitus, and Anabathra, which approach but remotely to
aught that now exists, the place of the ligneous scaly cone may have
been taken, as in the junipers and the yews, by a perishable berry;
while the Pines and Araucarians of the Oolite were, like their congeners
in recent times, in reality coniferous, that is, cone-bearing trees. It
is another characteristic of these Secondary conifers, that while the
woods of the Palaeozoic periods exhibit often, like those of the
tropics, none of the dense concentric lines of annual growth which mark
the reign of winter, these annual lines are scarce less strongly
impressed on the Oolitic woods than on those of Norway or of our own
country in the present day. In some of the fossil trees these yearly
rings are of great breadth; they seem to have sprung up in the rich soil
of sheltered hollows and plains, and to have increased in diameter from
half an inch to three quarters of an inch yearly; while in other trees
of the same species the yearly zones of growth are singularly
narrow,--in some instances little more than half a line in thickness.
Rooted on some exposed hill side, in a shallow and meagre soil, they
increased their diameter during the twelvemonth little more than a line
in the severer seasons, and little more than an eighth part of an inch
even when the seasons were most favorable. Further, whe