very erroneous, though of course
inadequate, conceptions of the ancient Coal Measure Flora: it was
impossible to doubt that its numerous ferns were really such; and though
I at first failed to trace the supposed analogies of its lepidodendra
and calamites, it was at least evident that they were the bole-like
stems of great plants, that had stood erect like trees. A certain amount
of fact, too, once acquired, enabled me to assimilate to the mass little
snatches of information, derived from chance paragraphs and occasional
articles in magazines and reviews, that, save for my previous
acquaintance with the organisms to which they referred, would have told
me nothing. And so the vegetation of the Coal Measures began gradually
to form within my mind's eye, where all had been blank before, as I had
seen the spires and columns of Edinburgh forming amid the fog, on the
morning of my arrival.

I found, however, one of the earliest dreams of my youth curiously
mingling with my restorations, or rather forming their groundwork. I had
read Gulliver at the proper age; and my imagination had become filled
with the little men and women, and retained strong hold of at least one
scene laid in the country of the very tall men--that in which the
traveller, after wandering amid grass that rose twenty feet over his
head, lost himself in a vast thicket of barley forty feet high. I became
the owner, in fancy, of a colony of Liliputians, that manned my
eighteen-inch canoe, or tilled my apron-breadth of a garden; and,
coupling with the men of Liliput the scene in Brobdignag, I had often
set myself to imagine, when playing truant on the green slopes of the
Hill, or among the swamps of the "Willows," how some of the
vignette-like scenes by which I was surrounded would have appeared to
creatures so minute. I have imagined them threading their way through
dark forests of bracken forty feet high--or admiring on the hill-side
some enormous club-moss that stretched out its green hairy arms for
whole roods--or arrested at the edge of some dangerous morass, by hedges
of gigantic horse-tail, that bore a-top, high over the bog, their
many-windowed, club-like cones, and at every point shot forth their
green verticillate leaves, huge as coach-wheels divested of the rim. And
while I thus dreamed for my Liliputian companions, I became for the time
a Liliputian myself, examined the minute in Nature as if through a
magnifying-glass, roamed in fancy under ferns t