SEQUOIA AND ITS HISTORY. 161 



Very similar would seem to have been the fate of a more 

 familiar gymnospermous tree, the Gingko or Salisburia. It 

 is now indigenous to Japan only. Its ancestor, as we may 

 fairly call it, — since, according to Heer, " it corresponds so 

 entirely with the living species that it can scarcely be sepa- 

 rated from it," — once inhabited northern Europe and the 

 whole arctic region round to Alaska, and had even a repre- 

 sentative farther south, in our Rocky Mountain district. For 

 some reason, this and Glyptostrobus survive only on the 

 shores of eastern Asia. 



Libocedrus, on the other hand, appears to have cast in its 

 lot with the Sequoias. Two species, according to Heer, were 

 with them in Spitzbergen. L. decurrens, the Incense Cedar, 

 is one of the noblest associates of the present lied woods. 

 But all the rest are in the southern hemisphere, two at the 

 southern extremity of the Andes, two in the South Sea Is- 

 lands. It is only by bold and far-reaching suppositions that 

 they can be geographically associated. 



The genealogy of the Torreyas is still wholly obscure ; yet 

 it is not unlikely that the Yew-like trees, named Taxites, which 

 flourished with the Sequoias in the tertiary arctic forests, are 

 the remote ancestors of the three species of Torreya, now 

 severally in Florida, in California, and in Japan. 



As to the Pines and Firs, these were more numerously as- 

 sociated with the ancient Sequoias of the polar forests than 

 with their present representatives, but in different species, 

 apparently more like those of eastern than of western North 

 America. They must have encircled the polar zone then, as 

 they encircle the present temperate zone now. 



I must refrain from all enumeration of the angiospermous 

 or ordinary deciduous trees and shrubs, which are now 

 known, by their fossil remains, to have flourished throughout 

 the polar regions when Greenland better deserved its name 

 and enjoyed the present climate of New England and New 

 Jersey. Then Greenland and the rest of the north abounded 

 with Oaks, representing the several groups of species which 

 now inhabit both our eastern and western forest districts ; 

 several Poplars, one very like our Balsam Poplar, or Balm of 



