DESCRIPTION OF SPECIES. (26 
cylindrical trunk, sometimes 10 feet in diameter, carries it beyond all its 
associates in size, while the beauty of its glossy lyre-shaped leaves and 
tulip-like flowers is surpassed only by that of the flowers and foliage of its 
first cousin, Magnolia grandiflora. That a plant so splendid should stand 
quite alone in the vegetation of the present day excited the wonder of the 
earlier botanists, but the Sassafras, the sweet gum, and the great Sequoias 
of the far West afford similar examples of isolation, and the latter are still 
more striking illustrations of solitary grandeur. 
Before the study of fossil plants threw its light upon the history of our 
living flora such cases admitted of no satisfactory explanation, but we now 
know that all the trees enumerated above, with our magnolias, button-ball, 
and deciduous cypress, are relics of the golden age of North American 
vegetation; of a time when a genial climate prevailed all the way to the 
Arctic Sea, and when a well-watered and fertile soil supported forests in 
which our now lonely giants lived surrounded by brothers, cousins, and 
more distant relatives as gigantic as themselves, and all combined to form 
the greatest forest growth the world has ever seen. But this glorious sum- 
mer, which continued perhaps a million of years, and created or fostered 
all the noblest forms of forest life that have come down to us, and many 
perhaps nobler that have perished, was followed by a winter of correspond- 
ing severity and duration—the Ice age—in which snows and glaciers 
spread from Greenland and Alaska southward until two-thirds of the con- 
tinent was under snow and ice. All the region north of New York and 
Cincinnati was then changed from a paradise to a howling wilderness, 
where not a trace remained of the luxuriant vegetation that before covered 
the surface, or of the varied fauna that was associated with it, except where 
leaves, trunks, and bones, relies of earlier generations, were buried in rock 
or soil too deep to be reached by the grinding glacier or the burrowing 
torrent. These relics we have disinterred on Greenland, Disco Island, on 
the McKenzie River, and in Alaska, as well as at many places farther 
south, as in the country bordering the Columbia, or the Missouri, and in 
New Jersey and Virginia. Seven quarto volumes filled with descriptions 
and plates of fossil plants constitute the contribution that Prof. Oswald 
Heer has made in his Flora Fossilis Arctica to our knowledge of the veg- 
etation that covered the circumpolar lands before the Ice age, and an equal 
