LATER CRETACEOUS AND KAINOZOIC. 



217 



Euroi:>c. It is also to be observed that, as Gardner points 

 out, theie are some differences indicating a diversity of 

 climate between Greenland and England, and even be- 

 tween Scotland and Ireland and the south of England, 

 and we have similar differences, though not strongly 

 marked, between the Laramie of northern Canada and 

 that of the United States. When all our beds of this 

 age from the Arctic sea to the 49th parallel have been 

 ransacked for plants, and when the palseobotanists of the 

 United States shall have succeeded in unravelling the 

 confusion which now exists between their Laramie and 

 the Middle Tertiary, the geologist of the future will be 

 able to restore with much certainty the distribution of 

 the vast forests which in the early Eocene covered the 

 now bare plains of interior America. Further, since the 

 break which in western Europe separates the flora of the 

 Cretaceous from that of the Eocene does not exist in 

 America, it will then be possible to trace the succession 

 from the Mesozoic flora of the Trias and of the Queen 

 Charlotte Islands and Kootanie series of the Lower Cre- 

 taceous up to the close of the Eocene ; and to deter- 

 mine, for America at least, the manner and conditions 

 under which the angiospermous flora of the later Creta- 

 ceous succeeded to the pines and cycads which charac- 

 terised the beginning of the Cretaceous period. In so 

 far as Europe is concerned, this may be more difficult, 

 since the want of continuity of land from ni h to south 

 seems there to have been fatal to the continu, ice of some 

 plants during changes of climate, and there were also 

 apparently in the Kainozoic period invasions at certain 

 times of species from the south and east, which did not 

 occur to the same extent in America. 



In recent reports on the Tertiary floras of Australia 

 and New Zealand,* Ettingshausen holds that the flora of 



ll'i 



« (i 



Geological Magazine," August, 1887. 



