Note 20 — Chapter XIII
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See Prof. Torell's discovery of Eophyton Linnæanum, a supposed land plant allied to the rushes and grasses of our day, in certain Swedish rocks of Lower Cambrian age. The writer has, through the kindness of Prof. Torell, seen specimens of these plants in the Museum of the Geological Survey at Stockholm. Mr. Murray, of the Canadian Geological Survey, was the first to discover in America (Labrador, Straits of Belle Isle) this same genus of plants. They are described and figured by Mr. Billings, who speaks of them as "slender, cylindrical, straight, reed-like plants," in the "Canadian Naturalist" for August, 1872.
Should the terrestrial nature of these plants be established on farther evidence, then we are warranted in supposing that there were isolated patches of land in the Cambrian or Primordial period, and if there was land there must have been bodies of fresh water, hence there may have been both terrestrial and aquatic insects, possibly of forms like the Podurids, May flies, Perlæ, mites and Pauropus of the present day. There was at any rate land in the Upper Silurian period, as Dr. J. W. Dawson describes land plants (Psilophyton) from the Lower Heiderberg Rocks of Gaspe, New Brunswick, corresponding in age with the Ludlow rocks of England.
We might also state in this connection that Dr. Dawson, the eminent fossil botanist of Montreal, concludes from the immense masses of carbon in the form of graphite in the Laurentian rocks of Canada, that "the Laurentian period was probably an age of most prolific vegetable growth. * * * Whether the vegetation of the Laurentian was wholly aquatic or in part terrestrial we have no means of knowing." In 1855, Dr. T. Sterry Hunt asserted "that the presence of iron ores, not less than that of graphite, points to the existence of organic life even during the Laurentian or so-called Azoic period." In 1861 he went farther and stated his belief in "the existence of an abundant vegetation during the Laurentian period." The Eophyton in Labrador occurs above the Trilobite (Paradoxides) beds, while in Sweden they occur below.