164 TREE ANCESTORS 



cave at Port Kennedy, Pennsylvania, once the lair of various 

 Pleistocene void animals; and in the buried river swamps of North 

 Carohna and Alabama. During an Interglacial period it spread 

 northward to southern Canada and left its leaves in the clays of 

 the Don Valley near Toronto. 



I have written several similar brief sketches of the geologic 

 history of different American forest trees and hope to add similar 

 accounts of others from time to time. My object is not purely 

 cultural. I hope that my readers will become awake to the records 

 of the ages preserved in the structure and habits of our commoner 

 forest trees. This fruiting habit acquired perhaps in the Eocene 

 three milHons of years ago, this anatomical feature of the wood 

 acquired perhaps in the Upper Cretaceous — the changing environ- 

 ment of the successive ages that moulded each type until it is 

 what we see it today. Let imagination play over the world his- 

 tory enacted in the shadows of these trees — the building of the 

 Rockies, the evolution of the mammals and of primitive man. 

 If the building of the tower of Babel, the hanging gardens of Baby- 

 lon, or the pyramids, are awe-inspiring, what shall we say of the 

 slow formation of the Himalayas, during which faunas came and 

 went while the sycamore line flourished on and on. Beside the 

 sycamore, oak or pine, the Rosetti stone or Elgin marbles are 

 things of yesterday. Why should we not venerate our forest trees 

 as we do man-built temples of classic days? When we are con- 

 fronted by a sycamore that witnessed De Soto crossing the Tom- 

 bigbee shall we not hesitate at the wanton destruction of what 

 should mean so much to us? 



