SEQUOIA AND ITS HISTORY. 149 
It was not always so. In the tertiary period, the geologi- 
eal botanists assure us, our own very Taxodium or Bald 
Cypress, and a Glyptostrobus, exceedingly like the present 
Chinese tree, and more than one Sequoia, coexisted in a 
fourth quarter of the globe, namely, in Europe! ‘This brings 
up the question: Is it possible to bridge over these four wide 
intervals of space and the much vaster interval of time, so 
as to bring these extraordinarily separated relatives into con- 
nection? The evidence which may be brought to bear upon 
this question is various and widely scattered. I bespeak your 
patience while I endeavor to bring together, in an abstract, 
the most important points of it. 
Some interesting facts may come out by comparing gener- 
ally the botany of the three remote regions, each of which is 
the sole home of one of these genera, 7. e., Sequoia in Cali- 
fornia, Taxodium in the Atlantic United States,’ and Glypto- 
strobus in China, which compose the whole of the peculiar 
tribe under consideration. 
Note then, first, that there is another set of three or four 
peculiar trees, in this case of the Yew family, which has just 
the same peculiar distribution, and which therefore may have 
the same explanation, whatever that explanation be. The 
genus Torreya, which commemorates our botanical Nestor 
and a former president of this association, Dr. Torrey, was 
founded upon a tree rather lately discovered (that is, about 
thirty-five years ago) in northern Florida. It is a noble, 
Yew-like tree, and very local, being, so far as known, nearly 
confined to a few miles along the shores of a single river. It 
seems as if it had somehow been crowded down out of the 
Alleghanies into its present limited southern quarters; for 
in cultivation it evinces a northern hardiness. Now another 
species of Torreya is a characteristic tree of Japan; and one 
very like it, if not the same, inhabits the mountains of north- 
1 The phrase “ Atlantic United States”? is here used throughout in 
contradistinction to Pacific United States. To the former of course be- 
longs, botanically and geographically, the valley of the Mississippi and its 
tributaries up to the eastern border of the great woodless plains, which 
constitute an intermediate region 
