SEQUOIA AND ITS HISTORY. 163 
from Greenland, two more Sequoias, one of them identical 
with a tertiary species, and one nearly allied to Sequoia 
Langsdorfii, which in turn is a probable ancestor of the 
common Californian Redwood ; has furnished to Newberry 
and Lesquereux in North America the remains of another 
ancient Sequoia, a Glyptostrobus, a Liquidambar which well 
represents our Sweet Gum, Oaks analogous to living ones, 
leaves of a Plane-tree, which are also in the tertiary and are 
scarcely distinguishable from our own Platanus occidentalis, 
of a Magnolia and a Tulip-tree, and “of a Sassafras undis- 
tinguishable from our living species.” I need not continue 
the enumeration. Suffice it to say that the facts justify the 
conclusion which Lesquereux — a scrupulous investigator — 
has already announced: “that the essential types of our 
actual flora are marked in the cretaceous period, and have 
come to us after passing, without notable changes, through 
the tertiary formations of our continent.” 
According to these views, as regards plants at least, the 
adaptation to successive times and changed conditions has 
been maintained, not by absolute renewals, but by gradual 
modifications. I, for one, cannot doubt that the present ex- 
isting species are the lineal successors of those that garnished 
the earth in the old time before them, and that they were as 
well adapted to their surroundings then, as those which flour- 
ish and bloom around us are to their conditions now. Order 
and exquisite adaptation did not wait for man’s coming, nor 
were they ever stereotyped. Organic nature, — by which I 
mean the system and totality of living things, and their adap- 
tation to each other and to the world, — with all its apparent 
and indeed real stability, should be likened, not to the ocean, 
which varies only by tidal oscillations from a fixed level to 
which it is always returning, but rather to a river, so vast 
that we can neither discern its shores nor reach its sources, 
whose onward flow is not less actual because too slow to be 
observed by the ephemerz which hover over its surface, or 
are borne upon its bosom. 
Such ideas as these, though still repugnant to some, and 
not long since to many, have so possessed the minds of the 
