have profitably labored as a dresser of gardens, a tiller of fields, or a keeper of flocks and herds. Nay, there are whole orders and families of plants of the very first importance to man which do not appear until late in even the Tertiary ages. Some degree of doubt must always attach to merely negative evidence; but Agassiz, a geologist whose statements must be received with respect by every student of the science, finds reason to conclude that the order of the Rosaceæ—an order more important to the gardener than almost any other, and to which the apple, the pear, the quince, the cherry, the plum, the peach, the apricot, the victorine, the almond, the raspberry, the strawberry, and the various brambleberries belong, together with all the roses and the potentillas—was introduced only a short time previous to the appearance of man. And the true grasses—a still more important order, which, as the corn-bearing plants of the agriculturist, feed at the present time at least two thirds of the human species, and in their humbler varieties form the staple food of the grazing animals—scarce appear in the fossil state at all. They are peculiarly plants of the human period.
Let me instance one other family of which the fossil botanist has not yet succeeded in finding any trace in even the Tertiary deposits, and which appears to have been specially created for the gratification of human sense. Unlike the Rosaceæ, it exhibits no rich blow of color, or tempting show of luscious fruit;— it does not appeal very directly to either the sense of taste or of sight: but it is richly odoriferous; and, though deemed somewhat out of place in the garden for the last century and more, it enters largely into the composition of some of our most fashionable perfumes. I refer to the Labiate family—a family to which the lavenders, the mints, the thymes, and the hyssops belong, with basil, rosemary, and marjoram—all plants of "gray renown," as Shenstone happily remarks in his description of the herbal of his "Schoolmistress."
"Herbs too she knew, and well of each could speak,
That in her garden sipped the silvery dew,
Where no vain flower disclosed a gaudy streak,
But herbs for use and physic not a few,
Of gray renown within those borders grew.
The tufted basil, pun-provoking thyme,
And fragrant balm, and sage of sober hue.
"And marjoram sweet in shepherd's posie found,
And lavender, whose spikes of azure bloom
Shall be erewhile in arid bundles bound,
To lurk amid her labors of the loom,
And crown her kerchiefs clean with meikle rare perfume.
"And here trim rosemary, that whilom crowned
The daintiest garden of the proudest peer,
Ere, driven from its envied site, it found
A sacred shelter for its branches here,
Where, edged with gold, its glittering skirts appear,
With horehound gray, and mint of softer green."
All the plants here enumerated belong to the labiate family; which, though unfashionable even in Shenstone's days, have still their products favorably received in the very best society. The rosemary, whose banishment from the gardens of the great he specially records, enters largely in the composition of eau de Cologne. Of the lavenders, one species (Lavendula vera) yields the well known lavender oil, and another (L. latifolio) the spike oil. The peppermint (Meantha viridus) furnishes the essence so popular under that name among our confectioners; and one of the most valued perfumes of the East (next to the famous Attar, a product of the Rosaceæ) is the oil of the Patchouly plant, another of the labiates. Let me indulge, ere quitting this part of the subject, in a single remark. There have been classes of religionists, not wholly absent from our own country, and well known on the Continent, who have deemed it a merit to deny themselves every pleasure of sense, however innocent and delicate. The excellent but mistaken Pascal refused to look upon a lovely landscape; and the Port Royalist nuns remarked, somewhat simply for their side of the argument, that they seemed as if warring with Providence, seeing that the favors which he was abundantly showering upon them, they, in obedience to the stern law of their lives, were continually rejecting. But it is better, surely, to be on the side of Providence against Pascal and the nuns, than on the side of Pascal and the nuns against Providence. The great Creator, who has provided so wisely and abundantly for all his creatures, knows what is best for us, infinitely better than we do ourselves; and there is neither sense nor merit, surely, in churlishly refusing to partake of that ample entertainment, sprinkled with delicate perfumes, garnished with roses, and crowned with the most delicious fruit, which we now know was not only specially prepared for us, but also got ready, as nearly as we can judge, for the appointed hour of our appearance at the feast. This we also know, that when the Divine Man came into the world—unlike the Port Royalists, he did not refuse the temperate use of any of these luxuries, not even of that "ointment of spikenard, very precious" (a product of the labiate family), with which Mary anointed his feet.
Fig. 44.
Fig. 45.
Though it may at first seem a little out of place, let us anticipate here, for the sake of the illustration which it affords, one of the sections of the other great division of our subject—that which treats of the fossil animals. Let us run briefly over the geologic history of insects, in order that we may mark the peculiar light which it casts on the character of the ancient floras. No insects have yet been detected in the Silurian or Old Red Sandstone Systems. They first appear amid the hard, dry, flowerless vegetation of the Coal Measures, and in genera suited to its character. Among these the scorpions take a prominent place—carnivorous arachnidæ of ill repute, that live under stones and fallen trunks, and seize fast with their nippers upon the creatures on which they prey, crustaceans usually, such as the wood-louse, or insects, such as the earth-beetles and their grubs. With the scorpions there occur cockroaches of types not at all unlike the existing ones, and that, judging from their appearance, must have been foul feeders, to which scarce anything could have come amiss as food. Books, manuscripts, leather, ink, oil, meat, even the bodies of the dead, are devoured indiscriminately by the recent Blatta gigantea of the warmer parts of the globe—one of the most disagreeable pests of the European settler, or of war vessels on foreign stations. I have among my books an age-embrowned copy of Ramsay's "Tea Table Miscellany," that had been carried into foreign parts by a musical relation, after it had seen hard service at home, and had become smoke dried and black; and yet even it, though but little tempting, as might be thought, was not safe from the cockroaches; for, finding it left open one day, they ate out in half an hour half its table of contents, consisting of several leaves. Assuredly, if the ancient Blattæ were as little nice in their eating as the devourers of the "Tea Table Miscellany," they would not have lacked food amid even the unproductive flora and meagre fauna of the Coal Measures. With these ancient cockroaches a few locusts and beetles have been found associated, together with a small Tinea—a creature allied to the common clothes-moth, and a Phasmia—a creature related to the spectre insects. But the group is an inconsiderable one; for insects seem to have occupied no very conspicuous place in the carboniferous fauna. The beetles appear to have been of the wood and seed devouring kinds, and would probably have found their food among the conifers; the Phasmidæ and grasshoppers would have lived on the tender shoots of the less rigid plants their contemporaries; the Tinea, probably on ligneous or cottony fibre. Not a single insect has the system yet produced of the now numerous kinds that
