THE OAK AND CHESTNUT 139 



this age in Italy, and France had nearly as many. Southern Spain 

 has furnished a dozen species, and others are scattered through 

 Germany, Styria, Slavonia and Asia Minor, to the Altai Mountains 

 of central Asia, and to Japan and Indo-China — the two last regions 

 each furnishing 6 species. In this country PHocene plant bearing 

 deposits are much rarer, but 2 oaks have been recorded from New 

 Jersey. Four, including an ancestral live oak, are found in Ala- 

 bama, and a form like the modern Quercus chrysolepis has been 

 described from California. 



Many oaks have been recorded from the Pleistocene, found in 

 deposits of Inter- or Post-Glacial age. Naturally these are largely 

 representatives of still existing species. Of between 20 and 30 

 of the Pleistocene forms recorded, only 3 or 4 are extinct, and 

 several of these such as pseudoalba or predigitata are but doubt- 

 fully extinct. With the exception of 3 oaks from the interesting 

 Interglacial deposits of the Don valley near Toronto the bulk of 

 the American records have come from the Coastal Plain in New 

 Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Alabama, 

 Mississippi, Tennessee and Kentucky. Oaks occur also in the 

 Pleistocene terraces near Morgantown, West Virginia, and in cave 

 deposits in Pennsylvania. 



There is an early Pleistocene oak found in the same deposits that 

 yielded the bones of the Ape man, Pithecanthropus, on the Island 

 of Java, and several still existing European oaks have been dis- 

 covered in the Pleistocene of Denmark, Germany, France, Italy 

 and Hungary. 



Opinions differ regarding the relationships of these numerous 

 fossil and living oaks. Ettingshausen saw in the Tertiary holly 

 oak, Quercus palaeo-ilex, a synthetic t3rpe from which many of the 

 existing forms might have been derived, and Trelease regards our 

 existing western Quercus chrysolepsis as representative of a similar 

 synthetic type. The latter author sees no evidence of- close rela- 

 tionsliip between American and European Tertiary species, but 

 thinks that there was an entirely independent evolution in both 

 hemispheres. This is inherently improbable, and although simi- 

 larities in fohar characters which can be pointed out are necessarily 



