BULLETIN 
TORREY BOTANICAL CLUB, 
Vol. XIV.) - New York, January, 1887. [No. f. 
The Ancestors of the Tulip-Tree. 
By J. S. NEWBERRY: 
Plates LXI and LXII. 
The genus Lrtodendron, as all botanists know, is represented 
in the present flora by a single species, ‘‘ the Tulip-tree,” which 
is confined:‘to Eastern America, but grows over all the area lying 
between the Lakes and the Gulf, the Mississippi and the Atlan- 
tic. It is a magnificent tree, on the whole the finest in our 
forests. Its cylindrical trunk, sometimes ten feet in diameter, 
carries it beyond all its associates in size, while the beauty of its 
glossy lyre-shaped leaves and tulip-like flowers are only surpassed 
by the flowers and foliage of its first cousin, Magnolia grandiflora. 
That a plant so splendid should stand quite alone in the vegeta- 
tion of the present day excited the wonder of the earlier botan- 
ists, but the Sassafras, the Sweet-gum and the great Sequoias of 
the far West afford similar examples of isolation, and the latter 
are still more striking illustrations of solitary grandeur. 
Before the study of fossil plants threw its light upon the his- 
tory of our living flora such cases admitted of no satisfactory ex- 
planation, but we now know that all the trees enumerated above 
with our Magnolias, Button-ball and deciduous Cypress, are 
relics of the golden age of North America vegetation; of a time 
when a genial climate prevailed all the way to the Arctic Sea, and 
when a well-watered and fertile soil supported forests in which 
our now lonely giants lived surrounded by brothers, cousins and 
more distant relatives as gigantic as themselves, and all combined 
to form the grandest forest-growth the world has ever seen. 
But the glorious summer which continued’ perhaps a million 
of years, and created or fostered all the noblest forms of forest 
life that have come down to us, and many perhaps nobler, 
that have perished, was followed by a winter of corresponding 
