222 THE STORY OF THE MOUNTAINS

land were spiders, scorpions, some of gigantic size, and centipedes. Through the air flew hundreds of different kinds of insects, May flies, cockroaches, crickets, and beetles. The magnate of the vertebrate world was the labyrinthodont (traces of which have | been found in Kashmir), which had a salamander- like body, a long tail, bony plates to protect his head, and armour of integumentary scales to protect his body. Of land trees and plants there were lepido- dendrons with huge stems clad with linear leaves and bearing cones; huge club mosses, climbing palms, such as grow in tropical forests of the present day, great funguses, and numerous ferns. Such was the type of vegetation and of land and sea animal life of the Coal period, and although not many remains of this age have yet been found in Kashmir, enough traces have been discovered to satisfy us that in the shallow estuarial water and on the islands of the inland sea there lived an animal and vegetable life which must have been very similar to what we know existed elsewhere.

For another fourteen million years or so after the.Coal period there is nothing special to record in the history of Kashmir. There may have been a line of islands along the core of the present