24 PLANT GEOGRAPHY 



cooling down to conditions similar to those of the present 

 day in Europe. In the earlier beds of this period in 

 Central France an evergreen oak, Laurus canariensis 

 Webb and Bert., and other species now confined to the 

 Canary Islands, the Japanese Torreya, a Buxus, and a 

 bamboo show kinship to the Miocene flora; as, perhaps, 

 also do the earlier lignites in the Val d'Arno with such 

 strikingly American genera as Liquidambar, Pevsea, 

 Carya, and Diospyros, together with numerous oaks and 

 pines. A later Pliocene deposit at Tegeleri in the Nether- 

 lands shows an interesting approximation to that 

 " Germanic " flora which now occupies the British Isles; 

 but contains also the Grape Vine (Vitis vim f era L.) and 

 Pterocarya caucasica C. A. Mey., now confined to the 

 Caucasus, magnolias, suggestive of Japan, and an 

 Indo-Chinese type of water-lily (Euryale), which plants 

 would seem not to have been able to spread north- 

 westward. 



The Cromer Forest-bed, the last evidence we have of 

 British vegetation before the setting in of the cold of the 

 Glacial epoch, yields plant-remains which tell of a mild, 

 moist climate, similar to that of England to-day, without 

 either Arctic or South European forms, but including 

 the Pine (Pinus sylvestris L.), the Spruce (Picea excelsa 

 Link), and the Water-chestnut (Trapa). 



While the Glossopteris flora of Gondwanaland was 

 yielding place to the Mesozoic Cycadean and Araucarian 

 assemblage it would seem that coralline limestones and 

 other marine deposits were accumulating in the wider 

 ancient Mediterranean Sea, or Tethys, that extended 

 from Texas to Scotland, the Yenisei, the Irawadi, Egypt, 

 and Java. These Jurassic deposits may have been 

 followed, over much the same area of deposit, extending 

 south-eastward to the river Murray, by others, in those 

 Cretaceous times when the Angiosperms rapidly 

 dominated the Gymnosperms. This domination may, 

 it has been suggested, have been accelerated by the 

 contemporaneous evolution of the higher honey-sucking 

 and pollen-eating groups of insects, the Lepidoptera and 

 Hymenoptera. Gondwanaland seems to have been dis- 

 membered by the sinking of the northern Indian Ocean 

 in Jurassic times, an earth -movement followed, perhaps, 

 by the outpouring of the vast mass of basaltic lavas of 

 the Deccan. Similarly extensive subsidences, such as 



