The Universalist. [volume] (Chicago [Ill.]) 1884-1897, 1895-03-16

To ENJOY such walk it will be nec-
essary to put back the clock Of time
some millions of years, and to fancy
the continents ON which we live in
very crude and uniformed condition,
and occupied by plants and animals
very different from those of the pres
ent day. Our presence then and
there will be a gross anachronism,
and we can be permitted such flight
of fancy only on the basis of the
knowledge of the conditions of that
long past time which we have OBJ
tanned from laborious study of the
vegetable and animal remains en-
tombed in the rocks associated with
our beds of coal; and from the at
tempt to realize these as they lived
and grew in their day.
The writer of these pages was born
and spent his boyhood on the coal
formation rocks, and his earliest col
lections were of fossil plants of the
coal formation. He has ever since
been more or less occupied with Car
boniferous fossils, and has through
life been endeavoring to realize and
to present to others the conditions of
the world in that period, and the
manner in which at that time great
stores of fossil fuel were laid up to
meet the wants of man in these later
days.
The rocks of the great Carbonifer-
Gus age, which contain the most i'm
portant beds of coal, are very widely
distributed on the continents of the
Northern Hemisphere. Though they
do not by any means everywhere con-
tain productive beds of coal, yet they
are the great homes of manufacturing
industries, the "black country" from
which so much of national wealth
emanates. 1t is interesting also that
it has pleased the Divine Ruler to
give an exceptionally large share of
this valuable geological formation to
the English race. Great Britain and
it's Colonies, and its daughter the
United States, possess between them
the larger part of the productive coal
deposits of the world, and on this
fact their wealth and greatness have
largely depended. We may there
fore fifty select for our walk some
part of the coal country in the famil-
lar regions of Britain or the United
States or Canada. Perhaps the coal
fields of Pennsylvania and Ohio will
serve our purpose as we'll as any
other. At the time to which we shall
transport ourselves, the black tenants
of our coal cellars, whether anthracite
or bituminous, were the living and
verdant covering of world so differ
ent from that in which we now live
that if transported to it in the body,
we might we'll imagine ourselves in
another planet.
Scene in an Ancient Forest.
Let us, then, take up our position
on some eminence where now the
ridges of the Appalachian mountains
of Pennsylvania rise. But we must
remember that as yet this mountain
range has not been born, for large
portions of it are formed of the Car
boniferous beds themselves, folded
into long ridges and burrows, which
at the time of our visit must have
been fat, and must therefore have
occupied a much greater breadth
than they do now. Still even at this
early period there were swelling up
lands at least, forming belt along
the eastern coast of North America;
and here in the first instance we may
take our stand, to obtain general
view of the landscape and to accus-
tom ourselves to the dense, dank at
mosphere of a time when the air was
more loaded both with vapor and
carbonic acid than it is at present.
Around us we see the ground Gov
cred with a dense growth of ferns
and lycopods, above which tower
groups of palm like tree-ferns, and
here and there clumps of pines, some
of them with leaves like those of our
modern yews, others with broader
fern like or oval leaves, like those of
the Gingko tree and Podocarpus of
Japan and China. The vegetation is
not unlike that of the uplands of New
Zealand or of Australia, or, though
the kinds of plants are different, APP
preaching in its general effect to that
of those sandy flats in Florida where
groves of struggling pines tower over
a profusion of the dwarf palmetto.
Insects of Enormous Size.
II we look around, we may first be
struck by seeing some flying creatures
that we might mistake for birds-great