First, you will be interested if you study the coal flora, with the abundance, beauty, and variety of the ferns. Now ferns in these islands grow principally in rocky woods, because there, beside the moisture, they get from decaying vegetable or decaying rock, especially limestone, the carbonic acid which is their special food, and which they do not get on our dry pastures, and still less in our cultivated fields. But in these islands there are two noble species, at least, which are true swamp-ferns; the Lastraea Thelypteris, which of old filled the fens, but is now all but extinct; and the Osmunda, or King-fern, which, as all know, will grow wherever it is damp enough about the roots. In Hampshire, in Devon, and Cornwall, and in the southwest of Ireland, the King-fern too is a true swamp fern. But in the Tropics I have seen more than once noble tree-ferns growing in wet savannahs at the sea-level, as freely as in the mountain-woods; ferns with such a stem as some of the coal ferns had, some fifteen feet in height, under which, as one rode on horseback, one saw the blazing blue sky, as through a parasol of delicate lace, as men might have long ages since have seen it, through the plumed fronds of the ferns now buried in the coal, had there only been a man then created to enjoy its beauty. Next we find plants called by geologists Calamites. There is no doubt now that they are of the same family as our Equiseta, or horse- tails, a race which has, over most parts of the globe, dwindled down now from twenty or thirty feet in height, as they were in the old coal measures, to paltry little weeds. The tallest Equisetum in England--the beautiful E. Telmateia--is seldom five feet high. But they, too, are mostly mud and swamp plants; and so may the Calamites have been. The Lepidodendrons, again, are without doubt the splendid old representatives of a family now dwindled down to such creeping things as our club-mosses, or Lycopodiums. Now it is a certain fact, which can be proved by the microscope, that a very great part of the best coal is actually made up of millions of the minute seeds of club- mosses, such as grow--a few of them, and those very small--on our moors; a proof, surely, not only of the vast amount of the vegetation in the coal-making age, but also of the vast time during which it lasted. The Lepidodendra may have been fifty or sixty feet high. There is not a Lycopodium in the world now, I believe, five feet high. But the club-mosses are now, in these islands and elsewhere, lovers of wet and peaty soils, and so may their huger prototypes have been, in the old forests of the coal. Of the Sigillariae we cannot say as much with certainty, for botanists are not agreed as to what low order of flowerless plants they belong. But that they rooted in clay beds there is proof, as you will hear presently.