With this _Magnolia_ were found other flowering plants which soon increased tremendously in numbers of individuals and differences of structure, such as our sassafras, the tulip tree, the poplar tree, and some others. All of these are trees or shrubs and we do not yet know whether herbs grew in the strange surroundings of that ancient forest or not. Their soft tissue may have prevented their preservation as fossils, but, at any rate, no herb has left its rock-written record from as early in this period as the trees and shrubs. All of these ancient trees have been recorded only in the northern hemisphere and it may be true that this part of the earth was the cradle of all those hosts of the flowering plants that now number over 150,000 species. There must have been a mighty struggle for occupancy of the really desirable plant sites soon after the rise of these immediate ancestors of our modern plants. For there is every evidence of the progressive dwindling of those still more ancient holdovers from the Carboniferous, and the steady encroachment of the newly arisen and obviously vigorous young race. As we get higher up in the strata, or, in other words, nearer to the present, there are literally thousands of these immediate ancestors of our modern flora, and it is not very long before herbs, particularly grasses and sedges, begin to be common, together with other monocotyledonous plants such as palms. One not unlike our coconut palm has been found in some of these strata in France.