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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.
Now, another species of Torreya is a characteristic tree of Japan; and one very like it, if not the same, inhabits the mountains of Northern China belongs, therefore, to the Eastern Asiatic temperate region, of which Northern China is a part, and Japan, as we shall see, the portion most interesting to us.
I bespeak your patience while I endeavor to bring together, in an abstract, the most important points of it. The genus Torreya, which commemorates our botanical Nestor and a former president of this Association, Dr. It is a noble, yew like tree, and very local, being, so far as known, nearly confined to a few miles along the shores of a single river.
It is only by bold and far-reaching suppositions that they can be geographically associated. The genealogy of the Torreyas is still wholly obscure; yet it is not unlikely that the yew-like trees, named Taxites, which flourished with the Sequoias in the tertiary arctic forests, are the remote ancestors of the three species of Torreya, now severally in Florida, in California, and in Japan.
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.
Moreover, the Torreya of Florida is associated with a yew; and the trees of this grove are the only yew-trees of Eastern North America; for the yew of our Northern woods is a decumbent shrub. A yew-tree, perhaps the same, is found with Taxodium in the temperate parts of Mexico.
There is only one more species of Torreya, and that is a companion of the redwoods in California. It is the tree locally known under the name of the California nutmeg. Here are three or four near brethren, species of the same genus, known nowhere else than in these three habitats.
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