79 
ease, according to Profs. Cope, Marsh, Meek, and Stevenson, 
with the lignites of Colorado and Utah. These facts are even 
more strongly marked in the case of Vancouver's Island, 
where the overlying fossils are of the most typical Cretaceous 
character. 
The Upper Missouri lignite beds, on the other hand, which 
Mr. Lesquereaux calls Lower EKocene, are doubtless of 
Miocene age. The flora of the Miocene period was very 
characteristic and wide-spread, covering our continent far into 
what is now the frozen north, and stretching over, by way of 
Iceland and the Hebrides, where there was doubtless an old 
land-connection, toand through Northern and Central Europe. 
The Hocene flora of Europe is altogether. different in its 
character, and there is no evidence yet furnished that its ana- 
logue exists upon this continent at all. It was distinctively 
Oriental and tropical, and widely removed from the succeed- 
ing Miocene flora, which is substantially identical with the 
Americo-Japanese flora of the present day. 
Of course, if stratigraphical evidence could be brought 
forward, to counteract the lack of botanical proof, the claim 
of Mr. Lesquereaux would be established. All that could 
then be said would be, that the Eocene flora of the Western 
countinent was unlike that of the EHastern; but when, as in 
Vancouver’s Island, and, according to Profs. Meek and 
Stevenson, in Colorado, the so-called Eocene lignites are 
overlaid by hundreds of feet of marine strata containing such 
universally recognized Cretaceous forms as Inoceramus, 
Baculites, Ammonites, etc., the evidence of their age can hard- 
ly be a matter open to question. 
Dr. HAgBet described a peculiar form of sensibility to 
sunlight, observed by him in a Wistaria growing in his 
garden. In the morning, the leaflets occupied a position 
inclined upward from the rachis; in the sunshine, they 
gradually expanded to a horizontal extension; and as the 
day declined, they drooped. 
THE PRESIDENT suggested that such a phenomenon is 
probably best explicable on the view that the leaf is com- 
