In the Devonian relics the land vegetation has for the first time been fairly well preserved. The huge club mosses made good their tenure on the land; and along the flats and low-lying lands by the rivers there were dense brakes of reedy calamites and masses of true ferns. The club mosses and the calamites diminished from their giant size eventually, but the ferns went on increasing, and ancestral types of the pines and the yews began to appear. The vegetation of Devonian times was sombre; there could have been no flowers, and the insects were not of the kind that speed from bloom to bloom. Insects there were, gigantic dragon-flies and insects akin to the many flies that haunt the water; but the myriad buzz of insect life as we know it in field and forest was not yet heard. It is rather an interesting fact that unmistakable evidence has been collected of the existence in Devonian times of those smallest of living things, the bacteria. Of the general distribution of the land we cannot speak with great certainty. The violent disturbances of Silurian times seem to have ceased, but movements of the land did not cease. Great parts of England were rising from the water, and stretching out above the waves to Belgium and Northern France. There was no German Ocean and no St. George's Channel at the end of the period; and Scotland, also rising above the waves, was accumulating deposits of volcanic ash and lava. While, however, the British Isles and great parts of Belgium, Denmark, Scandinavia, and Western Russia, and smaller areas in mid-France, mid-Germany, and the Balkans were rising the rest of Europe was submerged beneath the waters. In the United States there were similar risings and sinkings of the land, but, on the whole, the course of geological history seems to have been more peaceful across the Atlantic. In Europe, as in America, there do not seem to have been notable changes at the end of the Devonian, though there was some alteration in level in Russia, Bohemia, and Great Britain. The rolling waste of waters south of the Bristol Channel began to deepen.