SEQUOIA AND ITS HISTORY. 149 



It was not always so. In the tertiary period, the geologi- 

 cal botanists assure us, our own very Taxodium or Bald 

 Cypress, and a Glyptostrobus, exceedingly like the present 

 Chinese tree, and more than one Sequoia, coexisted in a 

 fourth quarter of the globe, namely, in Europe ! This brings 

 up the question: Is it possible to bridge over these four wide 

 intervals of space and the much vaster interval of time, so 

 as to bring these extraordinarily separated relatives into con- 

 nection? The evidence which may be brought to bear upon 

 this question is various and widely scattered. I bespeak your 

 patience while I endeavor to bring together, in an abstract, 

 the most important points of it. 



Some interesting facts may come out by comparing gener- 

 ally the botany of the three remote regions, each of which is 

 the sole home of one of these genera, i. e., Sequoia in Cali- 

 fornia, Taxodium in the Atlantic United States, 1 and Glypto- 

 strobus in China, which compose the whole of the peculiar 

 tribe under consideration. 



Note then, first, that there is another set of three or four 

 peculiar trees, in this case of the Yew family, which has just 

 the same peculiar distribution, and which therefore may have 

 the same explanation, whatever that explanation be. The 

 genus Torreya, which commemorates our botanical Xestor 

 and a former president of this association, Dr. Torrev. was 

 founded upon a tree rather lately discovered (that is, about 

 thirty-five years ago) in northern Florida. It is a noble, 

 Yew-like tree, and very local, being, so far as known, nearly 

 confined to a few miles along the shores of a single river. It 

 seems as if it had somehow been crowded down out of the 

 Alleghanies into its present limited southern quarters; for 

 in cultivation it evinces a northern hardiness. Now another 

 species of Torreya is a characteristic tree of Japan : and one 

 very like it, if not the same, inhabits the mountains of north- 



1 The phrase " Atlantic United States " is here used throughout in 

 contradistinction to Pacific United States. To the former of course he- 

 longs, botanically and geographically, the valley of the Mississippi and its 

 tributaries up to the eastern border of the great woodless plains, which 

 constitute an intermediate region. 



