THE SEQUOIAS OR BIG TREES 51 



Remains of sequoias from the lower beds of the Cretaceous have 

 been found in western Europe, in Spitzbergen, in Texas and in the 

 eastern United States. In sUghtly more recent deposits we find 

 them in Greenland, Canada, in the Black Hills and in Montana. 

 By the middle of the Cretaceous we find over a dozen different 

 species spread over the United States, with still others in Greenland 

 and in central and western Europe. Their remains are often 

 extremely common, whole branches bearing numerous cones, and 

 innumerable twigs, often beautifully preserved, being common 

 fossils. The warm humid climate of the period seems to have been 

 very favorable for their development, and the elevation of the 

 land, by which natural bridges, such as those closing Bering Straits 

 and the English Channel, enabled them to spread all over the north- 

 ern hemisphere and even into the southern, for in the next age, 

 the Eocene, we find their remains in far-off Australia and New 

 Zealand,^ while others occur in Alaska, stragglers from the migra- 

 tion into Asia. 



The great frozen north of today had not yet been hinted at, a 

 warm climate prevailed even in the far north, and Greenland was 

 the garden spot that its name implies. On its western coast many 

 plant-beds have been discovered, containing the remains of tree- 

 ferns, cycads, incense cedars, figs, camphor trees, magnolias, and 

 other natives of warmer climes. This northern region with numer- 

 ous land connections to lower latitudes was probably the original 

 home of our modern floras and faunas, which spread southward in 

 successive waves of migration. We know that the Mid-Cretaceous 

 witnessed the apparently sudden appearance of a host of new and 

 higher types, and the basal Eocene witnessed a Hke sudden appear- 

 ance of mammalian types and a second and more profound modern- 

 ization of the floras. It is in the frozen North or the unexplored 

 heart of Asia that we look today, hopeful that in one or the other of 

 those strategic regions that we will find the fossfls that will shed 

 their light on our problems of descent and distribution. 



^ The identification of these antipodean remains is not entirely beyond 

 question. 



