168 TREE ANCESTORS 



of any of our trees. They are light green in color and oblong in 

 form and are often 30 inches long and 9 or 10 inches wide. This 

 tree is not common and occurs as scattered individuals, haunting 

 moist ravines where the soil is deep and rich, in the region between 

 North Carolina and Alabama. Our umbrella-tree or elkwood. 

 Magnolia tripctala, an Appalachian species found scattered from 

 Pennsylvania to Alabama, also has large leaves, sometimes 20 

 inches long and 10 inches wide. Both of these and others of our 

 native species,, have frequently been cultivated as ornamental trees, 

 both in this country and Europe, and are hardy as far northward 

 as the southern New England coastal region. 



The only one of our native species whose natural range extends 

 that far northward is the sweet bay or swamp magnolia, a bush 

 or slender tree of deep swamps, which post glacial climatic changes 

 have left stranded in Essex County, Massachusetts, and on Long 

 Island, and which ranges southward to peninsular Florida and 

 eastern Texas. 



The magnolias contribute to the higher things of Hfe rather than 

 to the utiHties, and invariably suggest wayfarers from the orient 

 rather than the staid natives of the Temperate Zone. Not all of 

 them have blossoms that are especially beautiful and they turn 

 to a yellowish brown rather rapidly when picked, and nothing is 

 more dismal than one of the Asiatic forms that has been touched by 

 a late spring frost, but when favored by the weather nothing in 

 these chmes is more gorgeous. Some of the flowers are of sufficient 

 consistency that in exceptional cases they have been covered by 

 sediments before they decayed and thus preserved as fossils, and 

 several instances of this sort have been recorded. The peculiar 

 cone-hke fruits have also, and more frequently been preserved as 

 fossils. 



The fossil record of the magnohas is a long and extensive one and 

 worthy of a more complete exposition than I can give it here. 

 From the sediments laid down in the far off days of the Upper 

 Cretaceous the leaves of no less than 23 species of magnoha have 

 been described, and although some of these determinations may 

 be legitimately questioned, others seem to be authentic. Several 



