and perfume that we find among the 125,000 or more species that 
now struggle with each other to cover and dominate the earth. 
When the little fox-sized Eocene horse first made its appear- 
ance in Western America, forests of willow, oak, laurel, poplar 
and maple were abundant, and broad plains were covered with 
grasses and sedges. Figs, magnolias and palms flourished much 
further north than now, and even the ancient relatives of our 
tropical breadfruit grew as far north as Oregon. Bees, wasps 
and flies buzzed industriously about. Moths and butterflies 
flitted over the prairies and through the forest aisles, then as 
now, though perhaps they had not yet become so plentiful or so 
diversified. Alligators and numerous other saurians nosed their 
way sluggishly and gruntingly through the tall sedges. In 
general, the country is said to have worn the aspect of our 
Louisiana of to-day. 
So in that distant time, when years were still largely season- 
less, when the earth was mainly bathed in perpetual and monot- 
onous summer, the great struggle between the old club-moss, 
conifer, fern forests, and swamps, and the new angiospermous 
or flowering plant communities took place. Foot by foot the 
latter has made headway until now the former are mere relics of 
what they once were — relegated to favorable nooks and crannies 
such as mountain regions, certain poverty stricken soils and 
isolated islands, — and even these favored remnants will soon 
pass if the hand of man is not stayed. On some of the moun- 
tainous hillsides of the Yellowstone National Park, great petrified 
trunks of ancient redwoods now stand like monumental grave- 
stones overlooking a sea of verdure composed largely of populous 
communities of their successful rivals. Half buried in the 
desert sands of northern Arizona, the great agatized Araucarian 
logs lie piled in heaps, surrounded by sage brush and other 
modern representatives of the newer flora, while their own few 
remaining outposts are far away in South America, Australia 
and New Zealand. 
So rapidly, apparently, did the flowering plant spread after 
it had once arrived, that many scientists have pondered on why 
this type was so eminently successful. So well adapted to the 
regions of our earth were the}\ even in the infancy of their exist- 
ence, and so few connecting links with the older type of vtgeta- 
tion they replaced have been found, that Darwin often speculated 
as to whether they had not come from some huge, southern 
continent that had since sunk beneath the ocean. 
The answer to these questions, in part at least, is found in 
the relations that exist between the flowering plants and the 
insects. For both appeared on the evolutionary stage at about 
the same time. As is well known to-day, plants and insects are 
often mutually helpful to each other, especially those insects 
we know as bees, wasps, flies, moths and butterflies. The 
plant provides food, the insects act as “marriage brokers” or 
“go-betweens,” and through pollination insure the production of 
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