Prof. Asa Gray on Sequoia and its History. 69 



remains of another ancient Sequoia, a Olyptostrobus, a Liquid- 

 amhar which wel^ represents our sweet-gum tree, oaks analo- 

 gous to living ones, leaves of a plane-tree which arc also in 

 the tertiary and are scarcely distinguishable from our own 

 Platanus occidentalis, of a magnolia and tulip-tree, and " of 

 a sassafras undistinguishablc from our living species." I need 

 not continue the enumeration. Suffice it to say that the facts 

 will justify the conclusion which Lesquereux (a very scrupu- 

 lous investigator) has already announced, " That the essential 

 typos of our actual Hora are marked in the Cretaceous period, 

 and have come to us after passing, without notal>le 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 modifi- 

 cations. I, for one, cannot doubt that the present existing 

 species are the lineal suocessors 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 flourish 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 totality of living things, and their adaptation to each 

 other and to tlie 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 

 Ephemera3 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 

 naturalists of the present day that hardly a discourse can 

 be pronounced or an investigation prosecuted without refer- 

 ence to them. I suppose that the views here taken are little 

 if at all in advance of the average scientific mind of the day. 

 1 cannot regard them as less noble than those which they are 

 succeeding. 



An able philosophical writer. Miss Frances Power Cobbe, 

 has recently and truthfully said * : — 



" It is a singular fact that when we can find out how any 

 thing is done, our first conclusion seems to be that God did 

 not do it. No matter how wonderful, how beautiful, how in- 

 timately complex and delicate has been the machinery which 

 • " Darwinisui in Mi)rals," in 'I'heological Review, April 1871. 



