No. 5.] NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY. 287 



The actual facts are tliese. The flora of modern type comes 

 into being in the Cretaceous of the West without any known 

 ancestors, and it extends \yii\i so little change to our time that 

 some of the Cretaceous species are probably only varietally dis- 

 tinct from those now living. On the other hand the previous 

 Jurassic flora had died out apparently without successors. la 

 like manner the Cretaceous Dinosaurs and Cephalopods disappear 

 "without progeny, though one knows no reason why they might 

 not still live on the Pacific Coast. The Eocene mammals make 

 their appearance in a like mysterious w^ay. This is precisely 

 ■what we should expect if groups of species are introduced at 

 once by some creative process. It can be explained on the theory 

 of evolution, only by taking for granted all that ought to be 

 proved, and imagining series of causes and eff"ects of which no 

 trace remains in the record. 



The problems for solution are, however, much more com- 

 plicated tlian the derivationists seem to suppose. Let us illus- 

 trate this by the plants. The Cretaceous flora of North America 

 is in its general type similar to that of the Western and Southern 

 part of the continent at present. It is also so like that of the 

 Miocene of Europe that they have been supposed to be identical. 

 In Europe, however, the Cretaceous and Eocene floras, though 

 ■with some American forms, have a different aspect, more akin to 

 that of floras of the Southern Hemisphere. There have therefore 

 been more fluctuations in Europe than in America, where an 

 identical group of genera seems to have continued from the Cre- 

 taceous until now. Nay, there is reason to believe that some of 

 the oldest of these species are not more than varietally distinct 

 from their modern successors. Some that can be traced very 

 far back are absolutely identical with modern forms. For ex- 

 ample, I have seen specimens of a fern collected by Dr. Newberry 

 from the Fort-Union group of the Western States, one of those 

 groups disputed as of Cretaceous or Tertiary date, which is ab- 

 solutely identical with a fern found by Mr. Dawson in the Lignite 

 Tertiary of Manitoba, and also with specimens described by the 

 Duke of Argyle from the Miocene plant beds of Mull. Further 

 it is undoubtedly our common Canadian sensitive fern — Onoclea 

 sensihilis. There is every reason to believe that this is merely 

 one example out of many, of plants that were once spread over 

 Europe and America and have come down to us unmodified 

 throughout all the vicissitudes of the- Tertiary ages. But while 



