CHAPTER XVIII
FOSSIL PLANTS AS RECORDS OF ANCIENT COUNTRIES
The land which to-day appears so firm and unchanging has been under the sea many times, and in many different ways has been united to other land masses to form continents. At each period, doubtless, the solid earth appeared as stable as it is now, while the country was as well characterized, and had its typical scenery, plants, and animals. We know what an important feature of the character of any present country is its flora; and we have no reason to suspect that it was ever less so than it is to-day. Indeed, in the ages before men interfered with forest growth, and built their cities, with their destructive influences, the plants were relatively more important in the world landscape than they are to-day.
As we go back in the periods of geological history we find the plants had an ever-increasing area of distribution. To-day most individual species and many genera are limited to islands or parts of continents, but before the Glacial epoch many were distributed over both America and Europe. In the Mesozoic Ginkgo was spread all over the world, and in the present epoch it was confined to China and Japan till it was distributed again by cultivation; while in the Palæozoic period Lepidodendron seemed to stretch wellnigh from pole to pole.
The importance of the relation of plant structure to the climate and local physical conditions under which it was growing cannot be too much insisted upon. Modern biology and ecology are continually enlarging and rendering more precise our views of this interrelation, so that we can safely search the details of anatomical structure of the fossil plants for sidelights on the character of the countries they inhabited and their climates.
It has been remarked already that most of the fossils which we have well preserved, whether of plants or animals, were fossilized in rocks which collected under sea water; yet it was also noted that of marine plants we have almost no reliable fossils at all. How comes this seeming contradiction?
The lack of marine plant fossils probably depends on their easily decomposable nature, while the presence of the numerous land plants resulted from their drifting out to sea in streams and rivers, or dropping into the still salt marshes where they grew. Hence, in the rocks deposited in a sea, we have the plants preserved which grew on adjacent lands. In fresh water, also, the plants of the neighbourhood were often fossilized; but actually on the land itself but little was preserved. The winds and rains and decay that are always at work on a land area tend to break down and wash away its surface, not to build it up.
There are many different details which are used in determining the evidence of a fossil plant. Where leaf impressions are preserved which exhibit a close similarity to living species (as often happens in the Tertiary period), it is directly assumed that they lived under conditions like those under which the present plants of that kind are living; while, if the anatomy is well preserved (as in the Palæozoic and several Mesozoic types), we can compare its details with that of similar plants growing under known conditions, and judge of the climate that had nurtured the fossil plant while it grew.
Previous to the present period there was what is so well known as the Glacial epoch. In the earthy deposits of this age in which fossils are found plants are not uncommon. They are of the same kind as those now growing in the cold regions of the Arctic circle, and on the heights of hills whose temperature is much lower than that of the surrounding lowlands. Glacial epochs occurred in other parts of the world at different times; for example, in South Africa, in the Permo-Carboniferous period, during which time the fossils indicate that the warmth-loving plants were driven much farther north than is now the case.
It is largely from the nature of the plant fossils that we know the climate of England at the time preceding the Glacial epoch. Impressions of leaves and stems, and even of fruits, are abundant from the various periods of the Tertiary. Many of them were Angiosperms (see [Chap. VIII]), and were of the families and even genera which are now living, of which not a few belong to the warm regions of the earth, and are subtropical. It is generally assumed that the fossils related to, or identical with, these plants must therefore have found in Tertiary Northern Europe a much warmer climate than now exists. Not only in Northern Europe, but right up into the Arctic circle, such plants occur in Tertiary rocks, and even if we had not their living representatives with which to compare them, the large size and thin texture of their leaves, their smoothness, and a number of other characteristics would make it certain that the climate was very much milder than it is at present, though the value of some of the evidence has been overestimated.
From the Tertiary we are dependent chiefly on impressions of fossils; anatomical structure would doubtless yield more details, but even as it is we have quite enough evidence to throw much light on the physiography of the Tertiary period. The causes for such marked changes of climate must be left for the consideration of geologists and astronomers. Plants are passive, driven before great climatic changes, though they have a considerable influence on rainfall, as has been proved repeatedly in India in recent times.