Sa Bier pee a ae er Se Se 
SEQUOIA AND ITS HISTORY. 595 
Sequoia, a Glyptostrobus, a Liquidambar which well represents 
our sweet-gum tree, oaks analogous to living ones, leaves of a 
plane-tree, which are also in the tertiary and are scarcely distin- 
guishable from our own Platanus occidentalis, of a magnolia and 
tulip-tree, and “of a sassafras undistinguishable from our living 
species.” I need not continue the enumeration. Suffice it to say 
that the facts justify the conclusion which Lesquereux—a ver 
scrupulous investigator—has already announced: ‘that the es- 
sential types of our actual flora are marked in the cretaceous 
period, and have come to us after passing, without notable 
changes, through the tertiary formations of our continent.” 
According to these views, as regards plants at least, the 
adaptation to successive times and changed conditions has been 
maintained, not by absolute renewals, but by gradual modifica- 
tions. I, for one, cannot doubt that the present existing species 
are the lineal successors of those that garnished the earth in the 
old time before them, and that they were as well adapted to their 
surroundings then, as those which flourish and bloom around us 
are to their conditions now. Order and exquisite adaptation 
did not wait for man’s coming, nor were they ever stereotyped. 
Organic nature —by which I mean the system and totality of liv- 
ing things, and their adaptation to each other and to the world — 
With all its apparent and indeed real stability, should be likened, 
not to the ocean, which varies only by tidal oscillations from a 
fixed level to which it is always returning, but rather to a river, SO 
vast that we can neither discern its shores nor reach its sources, 
whose onward flow is not less actual because too slow to be 
observed by the ephemere which hover over its surface, or are 
borne upon its bosom. 
Such ideas as these, though still repugnant to some, and not 
long since to many, have so possessed the minds of the naturalists 
of the present day, that hardly a discourse can be pronounced or 
an investigation prosecuted without reference to them. I suppose 
that the views here taken are little, if at all, in advance of the 
average scientific mind of the day. I cannot regard them as less 
Noble than those which they are succeeding. 
An able philosophical writer, Miss Frances Power Cobbe, has 
Tecently and truthfully said :* 
* Darwinism in Morals; in Theological Review, April, 1871. 
