SEQUOIA AND ITS HISTORY. 163 



from Greenland, two more Sequoias, one of them identical 

 with a tertiary species, and one nearly allied to Sequoia 

 Langsdorfii, which in turn is a probable ancestor of the 

 common Californian Redwood ; has furnished to Newberry 

 and Lesquereux in North America the remains of another 

 ancient Sequoia, a Glyptostrobus, a Liquidambar which well 

 represents our Sweet Gum, Oaks analogous to living ones, 

 leaves of a Plane-tree, which are also in the tertiary and are 

 scarcely distinguishable from our own Platanus occidentalism 

 of a Magnolia and a Tulip-tree, and " of a Sassafras undis- 

 tinguishable from our living species." I need not continue 

 the enumeration. Suffice it to say that the facts justify the 

 conclusion which Lesquereux — a scrupulous investigator — 

 has already announced : " that the essential types of our 

 actual flora are marked in the cretaceous period, and have 

 come to us after passing, without notable changes, through 

 the tertiary formations of our continent." 



According to these views, as regards plants at least, the 

 adaptation to successive times and changed conditions has 

 been maintained, not by absolute renewals, but by gradual 

 modifications. I, for one, cannot doubt that the present ex- 

 isting species are the lineal successors of those that garnished 

 the earth in the old time before them, and that they were as 

 well adapted to their surroundings then, as those which flour- 

 ish and bloom around us are to their conditions now. Order 

 and exquisite adaptation did not wait for man's coming, nor 

 were they ever stereotyped. Organic nature, — by which I 

 mean the system and totalit}' of living things, and their adap- 

 tation to each other and to the world, — with all its apparent 

 and indeed real stability, should be likened, not to the ocean, 

 which varies only by tidal oscillations from a fixed level to 

 which it is always returning, but rather to a river, so vast 

 that we can neither discern its shores nor reach its sources, 

 whose onward flow is not less actual because too slow to be 

 observed by the ephemerae which hover over its surface, or 

 are borne upon its bosom. 



Such ideas as these, though still repugnant to some, and 

 not long since to many, have so possessed the minds of the 



