TEE ATLANTIC FOREST REGION 375 



trees and the birches which form a characteristic boreal forest zone 

 of similar features throughout the entire land area of the cold tem- 

 perate region from Kamschatka to Alaska. Farther south, as the 

 land masses diverge, the forest types show a decreasing likeness — yet 

 the broad-leaved woodlands of oak, beech and others are readily rec- 

 ognized as such in both the old and the new worlds. 



A number of American trees, however, and these characteristic of 

 the more southern portion of the Atlantic forest, have no European 

 counterparts. We look in vain through the forests of Europe for 

 such familiar forms as the hemlock, the hickories, the tulip tree, the 

 magnolias, the sassafras, the tupelo gums, the witchhazel, the Ken- 

 tucky coffee tree, the yellow-wood, the locusts, the catalpa and the 

 liquidambar. Strange as it may appear, nearly all of these eastern 

 American forms occur nowhere else in the world save in eastern Asia, 

 in the more temperate parts of China and Japan, where the same or 

 very nearly related species are to be found. What is even still more 

 striking is the contrast between the Atlantic and Pacific sides of 

 North America. Excepting along the mountain crests where the more 

 or less world-wide boreal plants find a congenial environment, the 

 vegetation of the California region is related mainly to the dry 

 plateau lands of Mexico and South America. So far as the trees are 

 concerned a native of the eastern United States would find himself 

 in much more homelike surroundings in the woodlands of temperate 

 China and Japan than on the Pacific slope of his own country. A 

 tulip tree, very similar to the one at home, almost if not the identical 

 species of sassafras, numerous closely related magnolias, a near relative 

 of the southern yellow-wood, the liquidambar, the catalpa, the coffee 

 tree, the hemlock, and other forms appear as familiar trees in the 

 landscape of China and Japan. This likeness between the two widely 

 separated regions is not confined to the trees alone. The flora at large 

 presents many features in common. The fox grape, the poison ivy, 

 the hydrangeas, the wistaria, the blue cohosh, the may-apple, the twin- 

 leaf, the trailing arbutus or may-flower, and the creeping snowberry 

 have each a more or less closely related form in eastern North America 

 and eastern Asia, but are found in no other part of the world. 



This likeness between the forest types of eastern North America 

 and eastern Asia dates from a period far back in the history of north- 

 ern lands. The tertiary deposits of Greenland and Spitzbergen have 

 yielded numerous fossil remains of trees, among them a magnolia, a 

 tulip tree, a sassafras and a liquidambar, quite similar, if not, in some 

 cases, identical with the species now living. Besides these forms that 

 are peculiar to the regions above named, the remains of other trees of 

 more wide-spread distribution have been found in Greenland — a bass- 

 wood, a plane tree, a persimmon, also several kinds of beeches, birches, 



