These were ideal conditions for the primitive vegetation, and it
spread over the swamps with great vigour. To say that the
Coal-forests were masses of Ferns, Horsetails, and Club-mosses is
a lifeless and misleading expression. The Club-mosses, or
Lycopodiales, were massive trees, rising sometimes to a height of
120 feet, and probably averaging about fifty feet in height and
one or two feet in diameter. The largest and most abundant of
them, the Sigillaria, sent up a scarred and fluted trunk to a
height of seventy or a hundred feet, without a branch, and was
crowned with a bunch of its long, tapering leaves. The
Lepidodendron, its fellow monarch of the forest, branched at the
summit, and terminated in clusters of its stiff, needle-like
leaves, six' or seven inches long, like enormous exaggerations of
the little cones at the ends of our Club-mosses to-day. The
Horsetails, which linger in their dwarfed descendants by our
streams to-day, and at their exceptional best (in a part of South
America) form slender stems about thirty feet high, were then
forest-trees, four to six feet in circumference and sometimes
ninety feet in height. These Calamites probably rose in dense
thickets from the borders of the lakes, their stumpy leaves
spreading in whorls at every joint in their hollow stems.
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