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The nearest living Proteaceae now feel the in Abyssinia in latitude 20 degrees N., but the greatest number are confined to the Cape and Australia. All geologists agree that the distribution of the Cretaceous land and sea had scarcely any connection with the present geography of the globe. Glyptostrobus Europaeus.
As to the remaining near relative of Sequoia, the Chinese Glyptostrobus, a species of it, and its veritable representative, was contemporaneous with Sequoia and Taxodium, not only in temperate Europe, but throughout the arctic regions from Greenland to Alaska.
So we have three groups of coniferous trees which agree in this peculiar geographical distribution, with, however, a notable extension of range in the case of the yew: 1. The redwoods, and their relatives, Taxodium and Glyptostrobus, which differ so as to constitute a genus for each of the three regions; 2. The Torreyas, more nearly akin, merely a different species in each region; 3.
I considered that our own present vegetation, or its proximate ancestry, must have occupied the arctic and subarctic regions in pliocene times, and that it had been gradually pushed southward as the temperature lowered and the glaciation advanced, even beyond its present habitation; that plants of the same stock and kindred, probably ranging round the arctic zone as the present arctic species do, made their forced migration southward upon widely different longitudes, and receded more or less as the climate grew warmer; that the general difference of climate which marks the eastern and the western sides of the continents the one extreme, the other mean was doubtless even then established, so that the same species and the same sorts of species would be likely to secure and retain foothold in the similar climates of Japan and the Atlantic United States, but not in intermediate regions of different distribution of heat and moisture; so that different species of the same genus, as in Torreya, or different genera of the same group, as redwood, Taxodium, and Glyptostrobus, or different associations of forest-trees, might establish themselves each in the region best suited to the particular requirements, while they would fail to do so in any other.
Its ancestor, as we may fairly call it since, according to Heer, "it corresponds so entirely with the living species that it can scarcely be separated from it" once inhabited Northern Europe and the whole arctic region round to Alaska, and had even a representative farther south, in our Rocky Mountain district. For some reason, this and Glyptostrobus survive only on the shores of Eastern Asia.
No. 9 is called the insect-bed, a layer only a few inches thick, which, when exposed to the frost, splits into leaves as thin as paper. In these thin laminae plants such as Liquidambar, Daphnogene, and Glyptostrobus, occur, with innumerable insects in a wonderful state of preservation, usually found singly.
Where it is not so, where near relatives are separated, there is usually something to be explained. Here is an instance. stance. These four trees, sole representatives of their tribe, dwell almost in three separate quarters of the world: the two redwoods in California, the bald cypress in Atlantic North America, its near relative, Glyptostrobus, in China. It was not always so.
In the Tertiary period, the geological botanists assure us, our own very Taxodium or bald cypress, and a Glyptostrobus, exceedingly like the present Chinese tree, and more than one Sequoia, coexisted in a fourth quarter of the globe, viz., in Europe!
It is well known as one of the largest trees of our Atlantic forest-district, and, although it never except perhaps in Mexico, and in rare instances attains the portliness of its Western relatives, yet it may equal them in longevity. The other relative is Glyptostrobus, a sort of modified Taxodium, being about as much like our bald cypress as one species of redwood is like the other.
The newer series are made up of sands and a conglomerate called "sansino." In the same upper strata are found, according to M. Gaudin, the leaves and cones of Glyptostrobus europaeus, a plant closely allied to G. heterophyllus, now inhabiting the north of China and Japan.
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