314 Geographical Distribution of Plants 



abrupt development of the higher plants. I have sometimes specu- 

 lated whether there did not exist somewhere during long ages an 

 extremely isolated continent, perhaps near the South Pole 1 ." 



The present trend of evidence is, however, all in favour of a 

 northern origin for flowering plants, and we can only appeal to the 

 imperfection of the geological record as a last resource to extricate 

 us from the difficulty of tracing the process. But Darwin's instinct 

 that at some time or other the southern hemisphere had played an 

 important part in the evolution of the vegetable kingdom did not 

 mislead him. Nothing probably would have given him greater 

 satisfaction than the masterly summary in which Seward has brought 

 together the evidence for the origin of the Glossopteris flora in 

 Gondwana land. 



"A vast continental area, of which remnants are preserved in 

 Australia, South Africa and South America.... A tract of enormous 

 extent occupying an area, part of which has since given place to 

 a southern ocean, while detached masses persist as portions of more 

 modern continents, which have enabled us to read in their fossil 

 plants and ice-scratched boulders the records of a lost continent, 

 in which the Mesozoic vegetation of the northern continent had its 

 birth 2 ." Darwin would probably have demurred on physical grounds 

 to the extent of the continent, and preferred to account for the 

 transoceanic distribution of its flora by the same means which must 

 have accomplished it on land. 



It must in fairness be added that Guppy's later views give some 

 support to the conjectural existence of the "lost continent." 'The 

 distribution of the genus Dammara" (Agathis) led him to modify 

 his earlier conclusions. He tells us : " In my volume on the geology 

 of Vanua Levu it was shown that the Tertiary period was an age of 

 submergence in the Western Pacific, and a disbelief in any previous 

 continental condition was expressed. My later view is more in 

 accordance with that of Wichmann, who, on geological grounds, 

 contended that the islands of the Western Pacific were in a con- 

 tinental condition during the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic periods, and 

 that their submergence and subsequent emergence took place in 

 Tertiary times 3 ." 



The weight of the geological evidence I am unable to scrutinise. 

 But though I must admit the possibility of some unconscious bias in 

 my own mind on the subject, I am impressed with the fact that the 

 known distribution of the Glossopteris flora in the southern hemi- 

 sphere is precisely paralleled by that of Protcaccae and Rcstiaceae in 



1 Life and Letters, in. p. 248. 



2 Encycl. Brit. (10th edit. 1902), Vol. xxxi. (" Palaeobotany ; Mesozoio"), p. 422. 



3 Guppy, op. cit. u. p. 304. 



