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Show 228 DARWINIAN A. miocene formations in Europe, has been specifically identified, :first by Greppert, then by I-Ieer, with our common cypress of the Southern States. It has been found fossil in Spitzbergen, Greenland, and Alaskain the latter country along with the remains of another form distinO'uishable, but very like the common ' b • • species; and this has been Identified ?Y Lesquereux in the miocene of the Rocky Mountams. So there is one species of tree which has come down essentially uncha~ged from the Tertiary period, which for a long while inhabited both Europe and North America, and also, at some part of the period, the region which geographically connects the two (once doubtless much more closely than now), but which has survived only in the Atlantic United States and Mexico. The same Sequoia which abounds in the same mio· cene formations in Northern Europe has been abundantly found in those of Iceland, Spitzbergen, Greenland Mackenzie River, and Alaska. It is named S. Lan~sdor.fii, but is pronounced to be very much like S. sempervirens, our living redwood of the Californian coast and to be the ancient representative of it. Fossil speci~ens of a similar, if not the same, species have recently been detected in the Rocky :Mountains by Hayden, and determined by our eminent palffiontological botanist, Lesquereux ; and he assures me that he has collected in Raynolds and Hayden's Yellowstone and Missouri Exploring Expedition, 1859-1860," published in 1869; and ~n inter.esting article entitled "The Ancient Lakes of Western Amenca, the1r Deposits and Drainage," published in Tlte .Amm·ican Naturalist, January, 1871. . The only document I was able to consult was Lesquereux's "Re. port on the Fossil Plants," in Hayden's report of 1872. SEQUOIA AND ITS HISTORY. 229 ~he comm.on redwood itself from Oregon in a deposIt. of terhai? ag~. Another Sequoia (S. Sternbergi~'), discovered m mwcene deposits in <;}reenland, is pronounced to be the representative of S. gigantea, the big tree of the Californian Sierra. If the Taxodium . of the tertiary time in Europe and throughout the arctic regions is the ancestor of our present bald cypress- which is assumed in regarding them as speci:fi- . cally identical-then I think we may, with our present light, fairly assume that the two redwoods of California are the direct or collateral descendants of the two ancient species which so closely resemble them. The forests of the arctic zone in tertiary times contained at "least three other species of Sequoia, as determined by their remains, one of which from . ' Spitzbergen, also much resembles the common red-wood of California. Another, " which appears to have been the commonest coniferous tree on Disco " was common in England and some other parts of Eu' - rope. So the Sequoias, now remarkable for their restricted station and numbers, as well as for their extraordinary size, are .of an ancient stock; their ancestors and kindred formed a large part of the forests which flourished throughout the polar regions, now desolate and ice-clad, and which extended into low latitudes in Europe. On this continent one species, at least, had reached to the vicinity of its present habitat before the glaciation of the region. Among the fossil specimens already found in California, but which our trustworthy palffiontological botanist has not yet bad time to examine, we may expect to find evidence of the early arrival of these two redwoods |