42 



BRITISH EOCENE ELORA. 



buted in error to the Mull fossil, so much so that this appears one of the readiest means 

 of distinguishing them. (Pis. I, V, VIII.) 



Although no fruit of Sequoia has been found in the Isle of Mull Leaf-bed, the 

 characters of the foliage agree in their minute details with those of Sequoia sempervirenSy 

 though the general form appears to have been more regularly branching. The reference 

 of the species to that genus seems fully justifiable. 



There can be little doubt respecting its identity with some of the foliage of the Swiss 

 Tcrtiaries, attributed to S. Lmigsdorfii, nor with some determined from the Italian 

 Miocene by Massalongho, and the German Miocenes by Weber and Heer. The foliage 

 from the Tertiaries of Greenland and Alaska, undoubtedly belonging to Sequoia, also 

 resembles it very closely, and connects it with a longer and more crowded, distichous. 

 Sequoia foliage from Spitzbergen. Very little of the English, Erench, or Austrian Eocene 

 Sequoia foliage can be safely united with it, though a branch in the British Museum, 

 from Leoben, in Styria, can in no respect be distinguished from it. Again, S. brevifolia, 

 Heer, from the lowest stage of the North-American Tertiary lignites and from Green- 

 land may be but an ordinary variation in foliage, such as can be seen in almost any 

 tree of S. sempervirens at the present day. The species, as might be inferred from its 

 almost perfect identity with the living one, had a northern range during the Eocene, Mull 

 apparently having been its southern limit, for, instead of abounding there as in other 

 localities, it is exceedingly rare, and has never been found in Antrim. It seems only to 

 have descended south towards the close of the Tertiary period in company with Ginkgo, 

 Taxodium distichum, and so many other northern plants which, after traversing Europe 

 during the Miocene or Brown-coal period, finally appear in the newer Miocene of North 

 Italy. Its place was occupied to the south during the Eocene by the dimorphic S. 

 TournaVn and ^S*. Hardtii^ and it is not a little interesting to find that S. sempervirens 

 under cultivation at Madeira, in a warmer climate than is natural to it, has, even in the 

 few years since its introduction, taken on a strong tendency towards a dimorphic habit.^ 

 Sequoia sempervirens, or the Red-wood tree, is a lofty evergreen, growing from 200 

 to 300 feet high, and from twenty to thirty feet in circumference, one tree even 

 measuring fifty-five feet in girth, six feet from the ground. It grows abundantly on the 

 mountains of Santa Cruz and the Sierras of primeval California. In the very heart of 

 these immense pine-belts the Red-wood forms, in company with the Sugar-pine, the 

 Douglas spruce, and Incense-cedar, superb columns towering 200 feet, in inviting woods 

 of sunny colonnades and park-like openings. 



The original specimen, which illustrated the Duke of Argyle's paper " On the Leaf- 

 Beds of Ardtun Head, in Mull," remains unique, and is in the Museum of Practical 

 Geology at Jermyn Street. I have, however, seen indistinct and scattered leaflets from 

 IJig, in Skye. 



1 The imbricated growth possibly takes place in winter or in spring, and is therefore more prolonged 

 in a warm than in a rigorous climate. 



