SASSAFRAS, SPICE-BUSH AND BAY 249 



Our American sassafras ranges from Massachusetts westward 

 to Iowa and Kansas and from Ontario and Michigan southward to 

 Florida and Texas. Just why it, along with the two Chinese species 

 should have remained a Temperate Zone type in contrast to the 

 vast majority of its relatives is a mystery. To be sure its most 

 ancient home was outside the Equatorial Zone, but this was also 

 true, at least ancestrally, of many of its kin. 



The ancestry of the sassafras has this remarkable feature— that 

 the most ancient known forms are quite like some of those stiU 

 existing as regards their leaves, showing both the two lobed mitten- 

 like and the three lobed leaves with which we are familiar, but 

 apparently without entire leaves. They are also remarkable in 

 that they are found in somewhat older rocks than most of the flower- 

 ing plants. Toward the close of Lower Cretaceous time, in the last 

 or Albian stage, as geologists call it, of that period, several different 

 kinds of sassafras have been found. One of these comes from west- 

 em Europe (Portugal) and three from eastern North America 

 (Maryland and Virginia). 



It seems incredible that in those far off days of the age of dino- 

 saurs trees so Hke their modern descendants should already have 

 been in existence. That they occur on both shores of the Atlantic 

 indicates a still more ancient ancestry, and an origin in a third 

 region accessible to both Portugal and Maryland. That this was 

 toward the north rather than in Asia seems probable from the rec- 

 ords of Upper Cretaceous time, of not only the sassafras, but of 

 many other plant types. 



Leaves like those of the sassafras are often exceedingly abundant 

 and varied in certain rocks of Upper Cretaceous age. Over a 

 dozen species have been described, and their leaves are especially 

 abundant in the shore deposits of the Upper Cretaceous sea that 

 advanced over our western great plains country (the Dakota sand- 

 stone), and in the muds of the estuaries and lagoons that skirted 

 the corresponding sea along our east coast at the time it commenced 

 to encroach on the old land. 



At least 3 different kinds of sassafras were present at that time 

 in western Greenland and along our eastern coast from New 



