152 ESSAYS. 



hazel, to Gum-trees (Nyssa and Liquidarnbar), Viburnum or 

 Diervilla ; it has few Asters and Golden-rods ; no Lobelias ; 

 no Huckleberries and hardly any Blueberries ; no Epigaea, 

 the charm of our earliest eastern spring, tempering an icy April 

 wind with a delicious wild fragrance ; no Kalmia nor Clethra, 

 nor Holly, nor Persimmon ; no Catalpa-tree, nor Trumpet- 

 creeper (Tecoma) ; nothing answering to Sassafras, nor to 

 Benzoin-tree, nor to Hickory ; neither Mulberry nor Elm ; no 

 Beech, true Chestnut, Hornbeam, nor Ironwood, nor a proper 

 Birch-tree ; and the enumeration might be continued very 

 much further by naming herbaceous plants and others familiar 

 only to botanists. 



In their place California is filled with plants of other types, 



— trees, shrubs, and herbs, of which I will only remark that 

 they are, with one or two exceptions, as different from the 

 plants of the eastern Asiatic region with which we are con- 

 cerned (Japan, China, and Mandchuria), as they are from 

 those of Atlantic North America. Their near relatives, when 

 they have any in other lands, are mostly southward, on the 

 Mexican plateau, or many as far south as Chili. The same 

 may be said of the plants of the intervening great plains, ex- 

 cept that northward and in the subsaline vegetation there are 

 some close alliances with the flora of the steppes of Siberia. 

 And along the crests of high mountain ranges the arctic-alpine 

 flora has sent southward more or less numerous representa- 

 tives through the whole length of the country. 



If we now compare, as to their flora generally, the Atlantic 

 United States with Japan, Mandchuria, and northern China, 



— i. e., eastern North America with eastern north Asia, half 

 the earth's circumference apart, — we find an astonishing 

 similarity. The larger part of the genera of our own region, 

 which I have enumerated as wanting in California, are present 

 in Japan or Mandchuria, along with many other peculiar 

 plants, divided between the two. There are plants enough of 

 the one region which have no representatives in the other. 

 There are types which appear to have reached the Atlantic 

 States from the south ; and there is a larger infusion of sub- 

 tropical Asiatic types into temperate China and Japan ; 



