hat had shot up into
trees, and saw the dark club-like heads of the equisetaceae stand up
over the spiky branches, some six yards or so above head. And now,
strange to tell, I found I had just to fall back on my old juvenile
imaginings, and to form my first approximate conceptions of the forests
of the Coal Measures, by learning to look at our ferns, club-mosses, and
equisetaceae, with the eye of some wandering traveller of Liliput lost
amid their entanglements. When sauntering at sunset along the edge of a
wood-embosomed stream that ran through the grounds, and beside which the
horse-tail rose thick and rank in the danker hollows, and the bracken
shot out its fronds from the drier banks, I had to sink in fancy as of
old into a manikin of a few inches, and to see intertropical jungles in
the tangled grasses and thickly-interlaced equisetaceae, and tall trees
in the brake and the lady-fern. But many a wanting feature had to be
supplied, and many an existing one altered. Amid forests of arboraceous
ferns, and of horse-tails tall as the masts of pinnaces, there stood up
gigantic club-mosses, thicker than the body of a man, and from sixty to
eighty feet in height, that mingled their foliage with strange monsters
of the vegetable world, of types no longer recognisable among the
existing forms--sculptured ullodendra, bearing rectilinear stripes of
sessile cones along their sides--and ornately tatooed sigillaria, fluted
like columns, and with vertical rows of leaves bristling over their
stems and larger branches. Such were some of the dreams in which I began
at this period for the first time to indulge; nor have they, like the
other dreams of youth, passed away. The aged poet has not unfrequently
to complain, that as he rises in years, his "visions float less palpably
before him." Those, on the contrary, which science conjures up, grow in
distinctness, as, in the process of slow acquirement, form after form is
evoked from out the obscurity of the past, and one restoration added to
another.

There were at this time several collier villages in the neighbourhood of
Edinburgh, which have since disappeared. They were situated on what were
called the "edge-coals"--those steep seams of the Mid-Lothian Coal
Basin which, lying low in the system, have got a more vertical tilt
against the trap eminences of the south and west than the upper seams in
the middle of the field, and which, as they could not be followed in
their abrupt descent