The Ancestry of the Cypress. 



41 



stance is recorded for the basal Eocene of Alberta. In high 

 latitudes we find Eocene records from Siberia, INIanchuria, 

 Alaska, Grinnell Land, Greenland, and Spitzbergen. From this 

 northern area the Cypress seems to have spread southward over 

 the western provinces of Canada at least as far as Montana, 

 Wyoming, and Nevada. In the next succeeding geological 

 period, the Oligocene, the records are rather meager if we assume 

 that all of the Arctic Tertiary occurrences are Eocene and not 

 in part Oligocene. There are, however, a number of European 

 records of this age including southern France and the Baltic 



* Fig. 1. Sketch map showing the known Tertiary distribution of Taxodium [shaded]. 

 Pleistocene occurences north of its present limits [dots], and its present distribution [black], 



provinces of the German Empire, from which the Cypress ex- 

 tended eastward into Asiatic Russia. The succeeding Miocene 

 period shows the C\ press extending from Japan on the east to 

 Austria, Switzerland, and Italy on the west. In North America 

 at tliis time we find the Cypress present in Virginia on the east 

 coast and in Oregon on the west coast. In Virginia the Miocene 

 Cypress seems to have clothed the swamps of the low-lying 

 shores; stream flow was sluggish and erosion slight and conse- 

 quent! v great beds of diatoms were formed along the coast with 

 but little land-derived sediment in them. In the last period of 

 the Tertiary, the Pliocene, we lack American records* but we 



"The writer has recently collected abimdant remains of the Cypress from the Pliocene of 

 Alabama. 



