In fact, the queer, witchy little things have a number of names: candle-rush, scouring-rush, horsetail, and their own proper appellation, equisetum. I have gathered a number of the little trees and they lie side by side in my palm while my mind tries to recall a few of the facts that go to make up the plant’s wonderful history. Our grandmothers used to strew their floors with it, that no careless tread might soil the snowy boards. They used it, as well, for scouring, hence its name. Those who seek correspondences between the natural and physical kingdoms find the rush an emblem of cleansing, and this is precisely the office which, since earliest creation, it has filled for the world. For our scouring-rush was not always the puny, insignificant thing we see it. It belongs to the carboniferous age. It has nothing to do with our modern civilization. It had reached its highest perfection and entered upon its downward career before man appeared on the earth. Its progenitors flourished with the giant ferns, the great, rank mosses, and all the rest of the carbon-storing vegetation. A mighty tree was our little rush in those days, growing several hundred feet tall and spreading out its huge whorls of branches in every direction. So we find it today, in the anthracite beds of the eastern slope. What happened to it that we should know it, living, as this degenerate creature of the bog?
In the carboniferous age the air surrounding the earth was much warmer than at present, warmer than we find it in the tropics. The great mass which constitutes this globe was not yet cool enough to support any very high forms of life. There were no trees, as we now understand the word, and there was very little animal life. Beetles crawled about, spiders and scorpions, and salamanders big as alligators, but there were no mammals, no birds
The world was in twilight, reeking with moisture, steaming in the warm air which it filled with all sorts of noxious gases. It rained aquafortis and brimstone, and the sweating earth sent these up again in deadly fog-banks of poisonous vapor
These were the conditions that our big rush loved. Its huge spongy stem and branches drank in life from the death-laden atmosphere. Its great creeping rootstocks soaked it up from the morass beneath and the rush grew luxuriantly. Its office was indeed a cleansing one, to purify the atmosphere and make it fit to sustain animal life. In time, as the huge primeval trees reached maturity, they died, and the mighty stems fell back in the bog. Then came some great upheaval, some cataclysm of nature such as we find everywhere recorded in her rocky books. The land rose or sank, and the rocks and debris of the sea floor were thrown upon the decaying vegetation. It was pressed and compressed beneath this weight. The fronds of the huge ferns; the tall stems of the giant rushes; the monstrous club-mosses, and the primeval forest became a peat-bog. Still greater pressure—a longer lapse of aeons, and the peat became coal.
