314 Geographical Distribution of Plants 
abrupt development of the higher plants. I have sometimes specu- 
lated whether there did not exist somewhere during long ages an 
extremely isolated continent, perhaps near the South Pole.” 
The present trend of evidence is, however, all in favour of a 
northern origin for flowering plants, and we can only appeal to the 
imperfection of the geological record as a last resource to extricate 
us from the difficulty of tracing the process. But Darwin’s instinct 
that at some time or other the southern hemisphere had played an 
important part in the evolution of the vegetable kingdom did not 
mislead him. Nothing probably would have given him greater 
satisfaction than the masterly summary in which Seward has brought 
together the evidence for the origin of the Glossopteris flora in 
Gondwana land. 
“A vast continental area, of which remnants are preserved in 
Australia, South Africa and South America....A tract of enormous 
extent occupying an area, part of which has since given place to 
a southern ocean, while detached masses persist as portions of more 
modern continents, which have enabled us to read in their fossil 
plants and ice-scratched boulders the records of a lost continent, 
in which the Mesozoic vegetation of the northern continent had its 
birth?” Darwin would probably have demurred on physical grounds 
to the extent of the continent, and preferred to account for the 
transoceanic distribution of its flora by the same means which must 
have accomplished it on land. 
It must in fairness be added that Guppy’s later views give some 
support to the conjectural existence of the “lost continent.” “The 
distribution of the genus Dammara” (Agathis) led him to modify 
his earlier conclusions. He tells us:—“In my volume on the geology 
of Vanua Levu it was shown that the Tertiary period was an age of 
submergence in the Western Pacific, and a disbelief in any previous 
continental condition was expressed. My later view is more in 
accordance with that of Wichmann, who, on geological grounds, 
contended that the islands of the Western Pacific were in a con- 
tinental condition during the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic periods, and 
that their submergence and subsequent emergence took place in 
Tertiary times®,” 
The weight of the geological evidence I am unable to scrutinise. 
But though I must admit the possibility of some unconscious bias in 
my own mind on the subject, I am impressed with the fact that the 
known distribution of the Glossopteris flora in the southern hemi- 
sphere is precisely paralleled by that of Proteaceae and Restiaceae in 
1 Life and Letters, 111. p. 248. 
2 Encycl. Brit. (10th edit. 1902), Vol. xxxt. (“ Palaeobotany ; Mesozoic”), p. 422. 
3 Guppy, op. cit. 11. p. 304. 
