beings that were to appear millions of years later upon the stage of life. Footnote 63: Lignite, or brown coal, is of more modern origin. [Illustration: LEPIDODENDRON ELEGANS.] [Illustration: ASTEROPHYLLITES COMOSA.] [Illustration: SIGILLARIA OCULATA.] [Illustration: CALAMITES NODOSUS.] The following description by Hugh Miller will assist our fancy in roaming among the primeval thickets from which coal was formed: ‘We have before us a low shore, covered with a dense vegetation. Huge trees of wonderful form stand out far into the water. There seems no intervening beach. A thick hedge of reeds, tall as the masts of pinnaces, runs along the deeper bays, like water-flags at the edge of a lake. A river of vast volume comes rolling from the interior, darkening the water for leagues with its slime and mud, and bearing with it to the open sea reeds and ferns and cones of the pine, and immense floats of leaves, and now and then some bulky tree undermined and uprooted by the current. We near the coast, and now enter the opening of the stream. A scarce penetrable phalanx of reeds, that attain to the height and wellnigh to the bulk of forest trees, is ranged on either hand. The bright and glossy stems seem rodded like Gothic columns; the pointed leaves stand out green at every joint, tier above tier, each tier resembling a coronal wreath, or an ancient crown with the rays turned outwards, and we see atop what may be either large spikes or catkins. What strange forms of vegetable life appear in the forest behind! Can that be a club-moss that raises its slender height for more than fifty feet from the soil? Or can these tall palm-like trees be actually ferns, and these spreading branches mere fronds? And then these gigantic reeds! are they not mere varieties of the common horsetail of our bogs and marshes, magnified some sixty or a hundred times? Have we arrived at some such country as the continent visited by Gulliver, in which he found thickets of weeds and grass tall as woods of twenty years’ growth, and lost himself amid a forest of corn fifty feet in height? The lesser vegetation of our own country, its reeds, mosses, and ferns, seems here as if viewed through a microscope, the dwarfs have sprung up into giants, and yet there appears to be no proportional increase in size among what are unequivocally its trees. Yonder is a group of what seem to be pines—tall and bulky, ’tis true, but neither taller nor bulkier than the pines of Norway and America. There is an amazing luxuriance of growth all around us. Scarce can the current make way through the thickets of aquatic plants that rise thick from the muddy bottom; and though the sunshine falls bright on the upper boughs of the tangled forest beyond, not a ray penetrates the more than twilight gloom that broods over the marshy platform below. The rank steam of decaying vegetation forms a thick blue haze, that partially obscures the underwood. Deadly lakes of carbonic acid gas have