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The larger part of the genera of our own region, which I have enumerated as wanting in California, are present in Japan or Mantchooria, along with many other peculiar plants, divided between the two. There are plants enough of the one region which have no representatives in the other.
The only other yews in America grow with the redwoods and the other Torreya in California, and extend northward into Oregon. Yews are also associated with Torreya in Japan; and they extend westward through Mantchooria and the Himalayas to Western Europe, and even to the Azores Islands, where occurs the common yew of the Old World.
Here come the autocrats of the neighborhood, the nouveaux enrichis! your friends the Montgomeries and Hills, than whom I would sooner shake hands with the Asiatic plague! I hear Madame Montgomery asking if I am not at home, as well as the ladies! Tell her I am in Spitzbergen or Mantchooria, where I certainly intend to be ere long."
If we now compare, as to their flora generally, the Atlantic United States with Japan, Mantchooria, and Northern China i.e., Eastern North America with Eastern North Asia, half the earth's circumference apart we find an astonishing similarity.
The original Wistaria is a woody leguminous climber with showy blossoms, native to the middle Atlantic States; the other species, which we so much prize in cultivation, W. Sinensis, is from China, as its name denotes, or perhaps only from Japan, where it is certainly indigenous. Its only and very near relative, Maackia, is confined to Mantchooria.
I ought not to omit ginseng, the root so prized by the Chinese, which they obtain from their northern provinces and Mantchooria, and which is now known to inhabit Corea and Northern Japan. The Jesuit Fathers identified the plant in Canada and the Atlantic States, brought over the Chinese name by which we know it, and established the trade in it, which was for many years most profitable.
Their dress is a loose robe of skins, or quilted nankeen, with a girdle. They tattoo their upper lip blue. Their huts or cabins of timber are thatched with grass, with a fire-place in the centre. The native name of this large island is Tehoka. "Between Japan and Mantchooria is the great peninsula of Corea, remarkable for the coldness of its climate, although in the latitude of Italy.
The point to be remarked is, that many, or even most, of the genera and species which are peculiar to North America as compared with Europe, and largely peculiar to Atlantic North America as compared with the Californian region, are also represented in Japan and Mantchooria, either by identical or by closely-similar forms! The same rule holds on a more northward line, although not so strikingly.
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