Let some vast and terrible devastation fall upon this
luxuriant world, entombing the great multitude of its imperfect
forms and selecting the higher types for freer life, and the
earth will pass into a new age.
But before we describe the animal inhabitants of these forests,
the part that the forests play in the story of life, and the
great cataclysm which selects the higher types from the myriads
of forms which the warm womb of the earth has poured out, we must
at least glance at the evolutionary position of the Carboniferous
plants themselves. Do they point downward to lower forms, and
upward to higher forms, as the theory of evolution requires? A
close inquiry into this would lead us deep into the problems of
the modern botanist, but we may borrow from him a few of the
results of the great labour he has expended on the subject within
the last decade.
Just as the animal world is primarily divided into Invertebrates
and Vertebrates, the plant world is primarily divided into a
lower kingdom of spore-bearing plants (the Cryptogams) and an
upper kingdom of seed-bearing plants (the Phanerogams). Again,
just as the first half of the earth's story is the age of
Invertebrate animals, so it is the age of Cryptogamous plants.
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