[Footnote 1: Nothing more is meant by the Hebrew "_deshe_." The true "grasses" (_graminea_),--cereals, bamboos, &c., are certainly not intended, for these are all conspicuously flowering plants, "herbs yielding seed," and therefore coming under the second plainly defined group. But the general term "sproutage" or "vegetation" is just adapted to signify the mass of cryptogamic plant-life, the mosses, lichens, algae, and then ferns, &c., which evidently formed the first stage of plant-life on the globe.] Now, as a matter of fact, there was no one long (or short) period during which the whole of this command was realized, _before_ the next creative act occurred. At first _algae_ and low forms of vegetable life appeared; and doubtless we have lost myriads upon myriads of such lower forms of plant-life in the early strata, because such forms were ill calculated for fossil-preservation, owing to the absence of woody fibre, silicious casing, or hard fruit or seed vessels. But when we first have a marked accumulation of specialized plant-life in the coal measures (Upper Carboniferous), it is still only of cryptogams--ferns and great club mosses. A beginning of true seed-bearing plants (Gymnosperm exogens) had been made with the _conifers_ of the Devonian strata; but true _grasses_, and the other orders of phanerogamic plants and arboreous vegetation, do not appear till the tertiary rocks were deposited, very long after the age of fish and great reptiles had culminated, and the inauguration of the bird age and the mammalian age had taken place. Looking only to the abundant, prominent, and characteristic life-forms of the several strata, it could certainly be said that the period when the _water_ actually brought forth a vast mass of its life-forms--corals, sertularias, crustaceans, and fish of the lower orders--must have _preceded_ (not followed) the time when the earth produced vegetation of all kinds, and further that it must have come after the appearance of scorpions and some land insects.[1] [Footnote 1: A single wing found little more than a year ago is the sole evidence of insects older than the Devonian; and scorpions (highly-organized crustaceans) have been found in the Upper Silurian in some abundance.] Moreover, as the regular succession in periods of light and darkness on the earth, and the sequence of seasons was not organized (but only a generally diffused light, and, probably, an uniform and moist state of climate without seasons) till _after_ the commands for the formation of the whole of the large classes of plants, both cryptogams and phanerogams, it is obvious that as many of these would require the fuller development of seasonal influences, the whole process could not have been worked out before the fourth day's creative work was begun.