iberia, and to China, and prolonged during some hundreds
of thousands of years, and you begin to realise that the Carboniferous
period prepared the land for the coming dynasties of animals. Let some
vast and terrible devastation fall upon this luxuriant world, entombing
the great multitude of its imperfect forms and selecting the higher
types for freer life, and the earth will pass into a new age.

But before we describe the animal inhabitants of these forests, the
part that the forests play in the story of life, and the great cataclysm
which selects the higher types from the myriads of forms which the
warm womb of the earth has poured out, we must at least glance at the
evolutionary position of the Carboniferous plants themselves. Do they
point downward to lower forms, and upward to higher forms, as the theory
of evolution requires? A close inquiry into this would lead us deep into
the problems of the modern botanist, but we may borrow from him a few
of the results of the great labour he has expended on the subject within
the last decade.

Just as the animal world is primarily divided into Invertebrates and
Vertebrates, the plant world is primarily divided into a lower kingdom
of spore-bearing plants (the Cryptogams) and an upper kingdom of
seed-bearing plants (the Phanerogams). Again, just as the first half of
the earth's story is the age of Invertebrate animals, so it is the age
of Cryptogamous plants. So far evolution was always justified in the
plant record. But there is a third parallel, of much greater interest.
We saw that at one time the evolutionist was puzzled by the clean
division of animals into Invertebrate and Vertebrate, and the sudden
appearance of the backbone in the chronicle: he was just as much puzzled
by the sharp division of our plants into Cryptogams and Phanerogams, and
the sudden appearance of the latter on the earth during the Coal-forest
period. And the issue has been a fresh and recent triumph for evolution.

Plants are so well preserved in the coal that many years of microscopic
study of the remains, and patient putting-together of the crushed and
scattered fragments, have shown the Carboniferous plants in quite a new
light. Instead of the Coal-forest being a vast assemblage of Cryptogams,
upon which the higher type of the Phanerogam is going suddenly to
descend from the clouds, it is, to a very great extent, a world of
plants that are struggling upward, along many paths, to the higher
le