152 ESSAYS. 
hazel, to Gum-trees (Nyssa and Liquidambar), Viburnum or 
Diervilla; it has few Asters and Golden-rods ; no Lobelias ; 
no Huckleberries and hardly any Blueberries ; no Epigza, 
the charm of our earliest eastern spring, tempering an icy April 
wind with a delicious wild fragrance ; no Kalmia nor Clethra, 
nor Holly, nor Persimmon; no Catalpa-tree, nor Trumpet- 
ereeper (Tecoma); nothing answering to Sassafras, nor to 
Benzoin-tree, nor to Hickory ; neither Mulberry nor Elm; no 
Beech, true Chestnut, Hornbeam, nor Ironwood, nor a proper 
Birch-tree ; and the enumeration might be continued very 
much further by naming herbaceous plants and others familiar 
only to botanists. 
In their place California is filled with plants of other types, 
—trees, shrubs, and herbs, of which I will only remark that 
they are, with one or two exceptions, as different from the 
plants of the eastern Asiatic region with which we are con- 
cerned (Japan, China, and Mandchuria), as they are from 
those of Atlantic North America. Their near relatives, when- 
they have any in other lands, are mostly southward, on the 
Mexican plateau, or many as far south as Chili. The same 
may be said of the plants of the intervening great plains, ex- 
cept that northward and in the subsaline vegetation there are 
some close alliances with the flora of the steppes of Siberia. 
And along the crests of high mountain ranges the arctic-alpine 
flora has sent southward more or less numerous representa- 
tives through the whole length of the country. 
If we now compare, as to their flora generally, the Atlantic 
United States with Japan, Mandchuria, and northern China, 
—i.e., eastern North America with eastern north Asia, half 
the earth’s circumference apart, —we find an astonishing 
similarity. The larger part of the genera of our own region, 
which I have enumerated as wanting in California, are present 
in Japan or Mandchuria, along with many other peculiar 
plants, divided between the two. There are plants enough of 
the one region which have no representatives in the other. 
There are types which appear to have reached the Atlantic 
States from the south ; and there is a larger infusion of sub- 
tropical Asiatic types into temperate China and Japan; 
