THE PLATANUS OR BUTTONBALL 163 



Hungary — a region remarkably rich in plant bearing deposits of 

 Tertiary age. 



Succeeding the Miocene are the deposits of the Pliocene lakes, 

 rivers and seas. The Phocene is the youngest period of the 

 Tertiary age. North America was of much the same geographical 

 extent as it is today and fossil plants are almost entirely unknown ; 

 consequently, although the plane trees were unquestionably present 

 they have left no records. Europe on the other hand was a region 

 of great geographical change and mountain-making. The chief 

 of these changes centered about the Mediterranean Sea, the center 

 of the classical world. At one time its waters withdrew westward 

 to Italy leaving behind a chain of lakes. A wide grassy plain 

 occupied the present Aegean region, another broad land bridge 

 stretched across from Sicily to the site where Carthage was subse- 

 quently founded on the African coast, and a third united Spain 

 with Morocco. At another time the Mediterranean waters ex- 

 tended over a vast area in southeastern Europe. The climate 

 was mild and humid and some of the finest forests that Europe 

 has ever known clothed its shores. Pliocene remains of Platanus 

 have been collected in Italy along the foothills of the rising Apen- 

 nines, from France, Spain, Styria, and Slavonia. 



-The Tertiary was succeeded by the Quaternary, the fourth age 

 of the older cosmogonists who divided the rocks into primary, 

 secondary, tertiary and quaternary. The latter includes the 

 Pleistocene, and the Recent period in which we are now living. 

 The Pleistocene is marked by chmatic changes which brought 

 about the extensive glaciation of the ice age, that most profound 

 factor in the distribution of modem animals and plants. The 

 most interesting Pleistocene deposits in the eyes of the botanist 

 are those of old forest beds and peat bogs. These show that the 

 plane tree was still present in central Europe, although today it 

 is not a native in that region except as it is planted. American 

 records show that our modem sycamore was already in existence 

 with habits much like it has at the present time. Its leaves and 

 fruits have been unearthed in the clays of river terraces around 

 Morgantown, West Virginia; in the sediments that tilled the bone 



