In the Oolitic flora we find a few peculiar features introduced. The Cyeadeæ,--a family of plants allied to the ferns on the one hand, and to the conifers on the other, and which in their general aspect not a little resemble stunted palms,--appear in this flora for the first time. Its coniferous genera, too, receive great accessions to their numbers, and begin to resemble, more closely than at an earlier period, the genera which still continue to exist. The cypresses, the yews, the thujas, the dammaras, all make their earliest appearance in the flora of the Oolite. Among our existing woods there seem to be but two conifers (that attain to the dignity of trees) indigenous to Britain,--the common yew, _Taxus baccata_, and the common Scotch fir, _Pinus sylvestris_; and yet we know that the latter alone formed, during the last few centuries, great woods, that darkened for many miles together the now barren moors and bare hill-sides of the Highlands of Scotland,--moors and hill-sides that, though long since divested of their last tree, are still known by their old name of _forests_. In the times of the Oolite, on the other hand, Britain had from fourteen to twenty different species of conifers; and its great forests, of whose existence we have direct evidence in the very abundant lignites of the system, must have possessed a richness and variety which our ancient fir woods of the historic or human period could not have possessed. With the Conifers and the Cycadeæ there were many ferns associated,--so many, that they still composed nearly two fifths of the entire flora; and associated with these, though in reduced proportions, we find the fern allies. The reduction, however, of these last is rather in species than in individuals. The Brora Coal, one of the most considerable Oolitic seams in Europe, seems to have been formed almost exclusively of an equisetum,--_E. columnare_. In this flora the more equivocal productions of the Coal Measures are represented by what seems to be the last of the Calamites; but it contains no Lepidodendra,--no Ulodendra,--no Sigillaria,--no Favularia,--no Knorria or Halonia. Those monsters of the vegetable world that united to the forms of its humbler productions the bulk of trees, had, with the solitary exception of the Calamites, passed into extinction; and ere the close of the system they too had disappeared. The forms borne by most of the Oolitic plants were comparatively familiar forms. With the Acrogens and Gymnogens we find the first indication of the Liliaceæ, or lily-like plants,--of plants, too, allied to the Pandanaceæ or screw pines, the fruits of which are sometimes preserved in a wonderfully perfect state of keeping in the Inferior Oolite, together with Carpolithes,--palm-like fruits, very ornately sculptured,--and the remains of at least one other monocotyledon, that bears the somewhat general name of an Endogenite. With these there occur a few disputed leaves, which I must persist in