cifically identical; and it seems more than doubtful whether
the stem which I have placed among the conifers is not a lycopodite
also. It exhibits not only the general outline of the true club moss,
but, like the fossil club mosses too, it wants that degree of
ligniferous body in the rock which the coniferous fossils almost always
possess. Yet another of the organisms of the deposit seems to have been
either a lycopodite or a fern. Its leaflets are exceedingly minute, and
set alternately on a stem slender as a hair,--circumstances in which it
resembles some of the tiny lycopodites of the tropics, such as
_Lycopodium apodium_. I must mention, however, that the larger plant of
the same beds which I have placed beside it, and which resembles it so
closely that my engraver finds it difficult to indicate any other
difference between them than that of size, appears to be a true fern,
not a lycopodium. To yet another vegetable organism of the system,--an
organism which must be regarded, if I do not mistake its character, as
at once very interesting and extraordinary, occurring as it does so low
in the scale, and bearing an antiquity so high,--I shall advert, after a
preliminary remark on a general characteristic of the flora to which it
belongs, but to which it seems to furnish a striking exception.

[Illustration: Fig. 146.

PHLEBOPTERIS.]

[Illustration: Fig. 147.]

[Illustration: Fig. 148.]

From the disappearance of many of those anomalous types of the Coal
Measures which so puzzle the botanist, and the extensive introduction of
types that still exist, we can better conceive of the general features
and relations of the flora of the Oolite than of those of the earlier
floras. And yet the general result at which we arrive may be found not
without its bearing on the older vegetations also. Throughout almost all
the families of this Oolitic flora, there seems to have run a curious
bond of relationship, which, like those ties which bound together some
of the old clans of our country, united them, high and low, into one
great sept, and conferred upon them a certain wonderful unity of
character and appearance. Let us assume the ferns as our central group.
Though less abundant than in the earlier creation of the Carboniferous
system, they seem to have occupied, judging from their remains, very
considerable space in the Oolitic vegetation; and with the ferns there
were associated in great abundance the two prevailing families