376 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 3 9 



know. The bald fact is that Moses Marshall, in 1790, was the last 

 man to see it growing where nature had preserved it through millions 

 of years. 



Franklinia^ as stated, is related to the Asiatic Camellia. It be- 

 longs in a natural family of shrubs and trees displaying the amaz- 

 ing disruption of range shown by hundreds of eastern North 

 American groups which, in Cretaceous or Tertiary time, had a wide 

 distribution across Eurasia and North America. Owing to the cli- 

 matic and physiographic changes accompanying late Tertiary 

 uplifts of western America and various parts of Eurasia, followed by 

 the refrigerations of Pleistocene glaciations, these hundreds of groups 

 have now disappeared from living floras except for disrupted rem- 

 nants, sometimes in southeastern Europe, but more generally in 

 southern and eastern Asia and in eastern North America. As long 

 ago as 1750, Halenius, in his doctor's thesis defended before Lin- 

 naeus at Upsala, pointed out this similarity in the floras of eastern 

 Asia and eastern North America, but it remained for the genius 

 of Asa Gray to bring this relationship vividly before the scientific 

 world. 



Many closely related, if not identical species of this eastern or 

 southern Asiatic and southeastern North American relationship are 

 in no danger of extermination : such groups, for instance, as Lirio- 

 dendron, the tulip tree, Hammnelis, the witch hazel, Sassafras., Nyssa, 

 the sour gums, and Symplocar'pus., the skunk cabbage. Others, how- 

 ever, after millions of years of competition with more youthful 

 types, have retained such tenuous footholds in America that they 

 are rightly looked upon as last remnants of the ancient flora which 

 have grown old where they now linger but which lack the capacity 

 to resist the invasions of more youthful or aggressively dominating 

 genera and species, and least of all the invasion of "that most de- 

 structive of all creatures, 'man.' " * Many of them are the rarest of 

 plants and some of the most remarkable have already suffered the 

 fate of Franklinia. 



In order to make quite clear the varying capacities to meet pres- 

 ent conditions of plants in the wild (and, I take it, a parallel 

 grouping can be made of mammals, birds, and lower groups of 

 animals), it is necessary briefly to consider the composition of the 

 wild flora of eastern America. To the layman the words "plants" 



=• The late C. S. Sargent placed Franklinia in the genus Oordonia, as O. altamaha 

 (Bartr.) Sargent. Melchior, however, reviewing (in Die Natiirlichen Pflanzenfamilien, 

 1925) the whole family Theaceae. with 23 genera and about 380 species, maintains 

 Franldinia altamaha Bartr. as a monotypic genus and in a different subtrlbe from the 

 chiefly Asiatic genus Gordonia (with 1 North American, 30 Asiatic species). This state- 

 ment seems important, since a correspondent of horticultural Journals, seeking to dis- 

 credit the statements in the original paper, asserts that I am in error in maintaining 

 Franklinia as a genus. 



* Scharff, R. F., Distribution and origin of life in America, p. 194, 1912. 



