distinctive characters are leaflets narrowed at the base, often lobed, and with nervures dividing in a pinnate manner from the base.

7. Phyllopteris, Brongniart.-These are pinnate, with long lanceolate pinnules, having a strong and well-defined midrib, and nerves proceeding from it very obliquely, and dividing as they proceed toward the margin. The ferns of this genus are for the most part found in formations more recent than the Carboniferous; but I have referred to it, with some doubt, one of our species.

8. Alethopteris, Brongniart.-This genus includes many of the most common coal-formation ferns, especially the ubiquitous A. lonchitica, which seems to have been the common brake of the coalformation, corresponding to Pteris aquilina in modern Europe and America. These are brake-like ferns, pinnate, with leaflets often long and narrow, decurrent on the petiole, adherent by their whole base, and united at base to each other. The midrib is continuous to the point, and the nervures run off from it nearly at right angles. In some of these ferns the fructification is known to have been marginal, as in Pteris.

9. Pecopteris, Brongniart.-This genus is intermediate between the last and Neuropteris. The leaflets are attached by the whole base, but not usually attached to each other; the midrib, though slender, attains to the summit; the nervures are given off less obliquely than in Neuropteris. This genus includes a large number of our most common fossil ferns.

10. Beinertia, Goeppert.-A genus established by Goeppert for a curious Pecopteris-like fern, with flexuous branching oblique nervures becoming parallel to the edge of the frond.

11. Hymenophyllites, Goeppert.-These are ferns similar to Sphenopteris, but divided at the margin into one-nerved lobes, in the manner of the modern genus Hymenophyllum.

12. Palæopteris, Geinitz.-This is a genus formed to include certain trunks of tree-ferns with oval transverse scars of leaves.

13. Caulopteris, Lindley and Hutton.-Is another genus of fossil trunks of tree-ferns, but with elongate scars of leaves.

14. Psaronius, Cotta.-Includes other trunks of tree-ferns with alternate scars or thick scales, and ordinarily with many aërial roots grouped round them, as in some modern tree-ferns.

15. Megaphyton, Artis.-Includes trunks of tree-ferns which bore their fronds, which were of great size, in two rows, one on each side of the stem. These were very peculiar trees, less like modern ferns than any of the others. My reasons for regarding them as ferns are stated in the following extract from a recent paper:

"Their thick stems, marked with linear scars and having two rows of large depressed areoles on the sides, suggest no affinities to any known plants. They are usually ranked with Lepidodendron and Ulodendron, but sometimes, and probably with greater reason, are regarded as allied to tree-ferns. At the Joggins a very fine species (M. magnificum) has been found, and at Sydney a smaller species (M. humile); but both are rare and not well preserved. If the large scars bore cones and the smaller bore leaves, then, as Brongniart remarks, the plant would much resemble Lepidophloios, in which the cone-scars are thus sometimes distichous. But the scars are not round and marked with radiating scales as in Lepidophloios; they are reniform or oval, and resemble those of tree-ferns, for which reason they may be regarded as more probably leaf-scars; and in that case the smaller linear scars would indicate ramenta, or small aërial roots. Further, the plant described by Corda as Zippea disticha is evidently a Megaphyton, and the structure of that species is plainly that of a tree-fern of somewhat peculiar type. On these grounds I incline to the opinion of Geinitz that these curious trees were allied to ferns, and bore two rows of large fronds, the trunks being covered with coarse hairs or small aërial roots. At one time I was disposed to suspect that they may have crept along the ground; but a specimen from Sydney shows the leaf-stalks proceeding from the stem at an angle so acute that the stem must, I think, have been erect. From the appearance of the scars it is probable that only a pair of fronds were borne at one time at the top of the stem; and, if these were broad and spreading, it would be a very graceful plant. To what extent plants of this type contributed to the accumulation of coal I have no means of ascertaining, their tissues in the state of coal not being distinguishable from those of ferns and Lycopodiacea."

16. For descriptions of the genus Archæopteris and other Erian ferns, see Chapter III.

CHAPTER V.

THE FLORA OF THE EARLY MESOZOIC.

GREAT physical changes occurred at the close of the Carboniferous age. The thick beds of sediment that had been accumulating in long lines along the primitive continents had weighed down the earth's crust. Slow subsidence had been proceeding from this cause in the coalformation period, and at its close vast wrinklings occurred, only surpassed by those of the old Laurentian time. Hence in the Appalachian region of America we have the Carboniferous beds thrown into abrupt folds, their shales converted into hard slates, their sandstones into quartzite and their coals into anthracite, and all this before the deposition of the Triassic Red Sandstones which constitute the earliest deposit of the great succeeding Mesozoic period. In like manner the coal - fields of Wales and elsewhere in western Europe have suffered similar treatment, and apparently at the same time.

This folding is, however, on both sides of the Atlantic limited to a band on the margin of the continents, and to certain interior lines of pressure, while in the middle, as in Ohio and Illinois in America, and in the great interior plains of Europe, the coal-beds are undisturbed and unaltered. In connection with this we have an entire change in the physical character of the deposits, a great elevation of the borders of the continents, and probably a considerable deepening of the seas, leading to the establishment of general geographical conditions which still remain, though they have been temporarily modified by subsequent subsidences and re-elevations.

Along with this a great change was in progress in vegetable and animal life. The flora and fauna of the Palæozoic gradually die out in the Permian and are replaced in the succeeding Trias by those of the Mesozoic time. Throughout the Permian, however, the remains of the coal-formation flora continue to exist, and some forms, as the Calamites, even seem to gain in importance, as do also certain types of coniferous trees. The Triassic, as well as the Permian, was marked by physical disturbances, more especially by great volcanic eruptions discharging vast beds and dykes of lava and layers of volcanic ash and agglomerate. This was the case more especially along the margins of the Atlantic, and probably also on those of the Pacific. The volcanic sheets and dykes associated with the Red Sandstones of Nova Scotia, Connecticut, and New Jersey are evidences of this.

At the close of the Permian and beginning of the Trias, in the midst of this transition time of physical disturbance, appear the great reptilian forms characteristic of the age of reptiles, and the earliest precursors of the mammals, and at this time the old Carboniferous forms of plants finally pass away, to be replaced by a flora scarcely more advanced, though different, and consisting of pines, cycads, and ferns, with gigantic equiseta, which are the successors of the genus Calamites, a genus which still survives in the early Trias. Of these groups the conifers, the ferns, and the equiseta are already familiar to us, and, in so far as they are concerned, a botanist who had studied the flora of the Carboniferous would have found himself at home in the succeeding period. The cycads are a new introduction. The whole, however, come within the limits of the cryptogams and the gymnosperms, so that here we have no advance.*

*Fontaine's "Early Mesozoic Flora of Virginia" gives a very good summary of this flora in America.

As we ascend, however, in the Mesozoic, we find new and higher types. Even within the Jurassic epoch, the next in succession to the Trias, there are clear indications of the presence of the endogens, in species allied to

FIG. 64.-Jurassic vegetation. Cycads and pines. (After Saporta.) the screw-pines and grasses; and the palms appear a little later, while a few exogenous trees have left their remains in the Lower Cretaceous, and in the Middle and Upper Cretaceous these higher plants come in abundantly and in generic forms still extant, so that the dawn. of the modern flora belongs to the Middle and Upper