As we go back in the periods of geological history we find the plants had an ever-increasing area of distribution. To-day most individual species and many genera are limited to islands or parts of continents, but before the Glacial epoch many were distributed over both America and Europe. In the Mesozoic _Ginkgo_ was spread all over the world, and in the present epoch it was confined to China and Japan till it was distributed again by cultivation; while in the Palæozoic period _Lepidodendron_ seemed to stretch wellnigh from pole to pole. The importance of the relation of plant structure to the climate and local physical conditions under which it was growing cannot be too much insisted upon. Modern biology and ecology are continually enlarging and rendering more precise our views of this interrelation, so that we can safely search the details of anatomical structure of the fossil plants for sidelights on the character of the countries they inhabited and their climates. It has been remarked already that most of the fossils which we have well preserved, whether of plants or animals, were fossilized in rocks which collected under sea water; yet it was also noted that of marine plants we have almost no reliable fossils at all. How comes this seeming contradiction? The lack of marine plant fossils probably depends on their easily decomposable nature, while the presence of the numerous land plants resulted from their drifting out to sea in streams and rivers, or dropping into the still salt marshes where they grew. Hence, in the rocks deposited in a sea, we have the plants preserved which grew on adjacent lands. In fresh water, also, the plants of the neighbourhood were often fossilized; but actually on the land itself but little was preserved. The winds and rains and decay that are always at work on a land area tend to break down and wash away its surface, not to build it up. There are many different details which are used in determining the evidence of a fossil plant. Where leaf impressions are preserved which exhibit a close similarity to living species (as often happens in the Tertiary period), it is directly assumed that they lived under conditions like those under which the present plants of that kind are living; while, if the anatomy is well preserved (as in the Palæozoic and several Mesozoic types), we can compare its details with that of similar plants growing under known conditions, and judge of the climate that had nurtured the fossil plant while it grew.