Australian Flowering Plants. 223 



origin for the plants common to South America and Austral- 

 asia, that such plants must have made some provision for the 

 many months of darkness which they must have experienced 

 in their migrations across the South Pole region from South 

 America to Australia. What provision, it may be asked, did 

 these plants make for the long winter's night? Did they 

 simply rest, and shed their leaves, from which the chlorophyll 

 had departed, or did they dispense with their leaves entirely ? 

 As a matter of fact, instead of having structures or devices 

 specially adapted for the polar darkness, they are just those 

 types of plants which might be expected to have been developed 

 in a temperate climate, with the exception of the cold species 

 common to the various areas under consideration and already 

 enumerated in part, and which may be found also on the islands 

 lying between Cape Horn and New Zealand. Epilobium, 

 Senecio, Caltha, Banunculns, Tillcea, and other genera, are 

 common to the areas considered, but they are cosmopolitan in 

 temperate and cold regions. At the least one would expect 

 such types to be deciduous, but this is exactly what they are 

 not. 



(3) The Catkin-bearing Plants. 



The possible distribution in time and space of the catkin- 

 bearing plants may be considered in this connection. This 

 deduced distribution is suggestive of the method of dispersal 

 and development of Librocedrns, Podocarpus, Dacrydium, 

 Caltha, Ranunculus, and Epilobium, in what may be called 

 the southern "dead-ends" of the world. 



From a comparison of the various types of plants which bear 

 catkins, it may be conjectured that the earlier types were forest 

 trees of luxuriant habit, many types possessing beautiful pin- 

 nate or compound leaves, and moreover trees which seem to 

 have been lovers of mild and moist climates. They appear to 

 have spread over the world during the Cretaceous, or at any 

 rate, before the isolation of Australia and New Zealand from 

 the greater land blocks. At a stage relatively early in the 

 history of angiosperms these types appear to have been unfitted 

 to cope with the severe competition of the entomophilous jungle- 

 plants of the more tropical regions, inasmuch as the catkin- 

 bearing plants were adapted to wind fertilization and were 

 hampered in great measure by the suffocating and strangling 

 action of the later plant types of the milder and moister cli- 

 mates. Not only so but the hard baked clays and waterless 

 tracts of the dry torrid regions were also unfavorable to their 



