296 EDWARD W. BERRY 



wood has no special uses that I know of, consequently we are 

 not likely to be deprived of the striking beauty of the Judas- 

 tree as we probably should if the wood could be used for bobbins 

 or lead-pencils or boxes. 



Fortunately in the case of .the Judas-tree a considerable 

 beginning has been made in tracing its geological history, 

 although the inevitable gaps in this history have not all been 

 closed. The oldest knoAvn forms come from the lower Eocene 

 and all of these, three in number, are North American, occurring 

 in Tennessee, Mississippi, Montana and Dakota — the last being 

 in a region now one of prairies and bad lands far removed from 

 the habitat of any of the existing forms and showing how the 

 ancestral Judas trees were enabled to migrate across North 

 America in the more humid days that preceded the development 

 of the prairie type of country. A middle Eocene species occurs 

 at Bournemouth on the south coast of England. By succeeding 

 Oligocene times the Judas-tree had appeared at additional 

 localities in Europe where a very characteristic form is found in 

 southeastern France in the lower Oligocene and a second French 

 species occurs at a somewhat later stage of the Oligocene. 



We are without information as to whether Cercis came down 

 from the north into both North America and Europe or whether 

 America was its original home and it spread across the land 

 bridge in the region of Behring Sea into Asia and thence into 

 Europe. Personally I favor the interpretation that the vast 

 and paleobotanically almost unknown continent of Asia was the 

 original home of the genus from which it spread westward into 

 Europe and eastward across the Behring land bridge into North 

 America. If this is the true story then this migration must 

 have taken place during Upper Cretaceous times even though 

 we have not yet found Cercis in the abundant Upper Cretaceous 

 floras, for it is present in the lower Eocene of our Gulf states 

 and in the middle Eocene of the south of England and a journey 

 from Asia would have required a very long time. 



The Miocene was pre-eminently the period of hardwood 

 forests, and the ancestral Judas trees seem to have reached the 

 zenith of their differentiation and their most extensive range 



