444 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 193 8 



that it exists only in cultivation, the apparently wild trees being the 

 offspring of parents planted by man. One thing is certain: Ginkgo 

 has long been cultivated in China and Japan, and the oldest speci- 

 mens occur in the neighborhood of temples, so that it has sometimes 

 been regarded as a sacred tree. Seeds have doubtless been dispersed 

 by natural agency, producing trees at increasing distances from the 

 parents: it is therefore not always easy to distinguish cultivated from 

 wild specimens. English botanists and plant collectors who have trav- 

 eled extensively in China say that they failed to discover the tree in 

 forests remote from civilization. On the other hand, a few years 

 ago a Chinese botanist recorded the occurrence of Ginkgo biloba in 

 certain localities in the Chekiang province of eastern China: he 

 wrote — "This tree is very common in Tienmu-Shan growing in associ- 

 ation with conifers and broad-leaved trees. It seems to grow spon- 

 taneously in that region." An affirmative reply to the question, does 

 Ginkgo still exist in natural forests as a wild tree? cannot be given with 

 absolute certainty. It may still exist in places where man has played 

 no part, and that is as much as can be said without reservation. 

 There can be no doubt that China was the last, if it is not the present, 

 natural home of the maidenhair tree. It was brought to Europe in the 

 early part of the eighteenth century; to Utrecht about 1730, and to 

 England a little later: the tree is now fairly common in European 

 gardens, admired for its autumn coloring and the fernlike venation 

 of the leaves. There is, however, another attribute which entitles it 

 to our respect and protection: it is a remarkable and almost unique 

 example of the extraordinary conservation and vitality through mil- 

 lions of years of a member of the plant kingdom whose forbears were 

 forest trees ages before the birth of the human race, ages before the 

 existence of our familiar broad-leaved trees, and antedating almost the 

 whole of the mammals. In comparison with most impressive man- 

 made monuments, such as the step pyramid of Saqqara, which take 

 us back to the dawn of civilization, the records of plants preserved by 

 nature in the sands and muds of former ages speak to us of a past 

 beyond the power of human intelligence to appreciate. After read- 

 ing the following summary of the history of Ginkgo and its allies it 

 will be easier to appreciate the reasonableness of describing the maid- 

 enhair tree as one of the wonders of the world; it has persisted with 

 little change until the present through a long succession of ages when 

 the earth was inhabited by animals and plants for the most part far 

 removed, in kind as in time, from their living descendants. Ginkgo 

 is one of a small company of living plants which illustrates continuity 

 and exceptional power of endurance in a changing world. The ginkgos 

 that grew in western and eastern forests 100 and 200 million years 

 ago were no doubt very similar in appearance to the species that alone 

 survives; they lived the same life, depending upon the light of the 



