594 SEQUOIA AND ITS HISTORY. 
I must refrain from all enumeration of the angiospermous or — 
ordinary deciduous trees and shrubs, which are now known, by — 
their fossil remains, to have flourished throughout the polar regions _ 
_ when Greenland better deserved its name and enjoyed the present — 
climate of New England and New Jersey. Then Greenland and 
the rest of the north abounded with oaks, representing the several — 
groups of species which now inhabit-both our eastern and western ; 
forest districts ; several poplars, one very like our balsam poplar, i 
or balm of Gilead tree ; more beeches than there are now, a hom- — 
beam, and a hop-hornbeam, some birches, a persimmon, ada 
planer-tree, near representatives of those of the Old World, at least 
of Asia, as well as of Atlantic North America, but all wanting 
in California ; one Juglans like the walnut of the Old World, and — 
another like our black walnut; two or three grapevines, one near : 
our Southern fox grape or Muscadine, another near our Northern 
frost grape ; a Tilia, very like our basswood of the Atlantic States : 
only; a Liquidambar; a Magnolia, which recalls our M. grandi- = 
flora; a Liriodendron, sole representative of our tulip-tree; anda 
sassafras, very like the living tree. : 
Most of these, it will be noticed, have their nearest or their only 7 
‘living representatives in the Atlantic States, and when elsewhere, 
mainly in Eastern Asia. Several of them, orof species like them, 
have been detected in our tertiary deposits, west of the Missi 
sippi, by Newberry and Lesquereux. fees 
Herbaceous plants, as it happens, are rarely preserved ina . 
fossil state, else they would probably supply additional ii 
to the antiquity of our existing vegetation, its wide diffúsion ad 
the northern and now frigid zone, and its enforced migrati 
under changes of climate. 
Concluding, then, as we must, that our e 
continuation of that of the tertiary period, may we suppose ing 
it absolutely originated then? Evidently not. The pret fossil 
cretaceous period has furnished to Carruthers in Europe a 
fruit like that of the Sequoia gigantea of the famous 
' ciated with pines of the same character as those that a% w 
xisting vegetation y> 
groves, asso 
the present tree ; has furnished to Heer, from Greenland, tW0 
Sequoias, one of them identical with a tertiary speciesy pes 
nearly allied to Sequoia Langsdorfii, which in turn 18 ê wee 
ancestor of the common Californian redwood; has fon jent 
Lesquereux in North America the remains of another n i 
