The kinship between some of these arctic and sub-arctic fossilized flora and the living forms of to-day, is so near that they cannot be distinguished by a single difference. This is true of some of the varieties of the _Sequoia_ family, the oaks, beeches, firs, hazelnuts, etc., while others are so nearly identical that it would be difficult to classify them as separate varieties. At all events, if they cannot be placed in the list of identical species, they cannot be ruled out of representative types. But why should our speculative botanists insist upon these "evolutional changes" in plant-life--these "derivative forms" of which they are constantly speaking? Paleontological botany has given us the very highest antiquity of species, and the most that can be claimed is that nature was just as prolific of diversified forms millions of years ago as now. Because we, by forcing nature into unnatural, if not repugnant, alliances, can produce --"Streak'd gillyflowers, Which some call nature's bastards." it is no evidence that she commits any such offence against herself. Her alliances are all loving ones. She indulges in no forced methods of propagation. If she produced the _Sequoia gigantea_, or the great redwood tree of our California Sierra, as far back as the Crustaceous period, she has propagated it ever since according to her own loving methods, and it is idle to talk of the _Sequoia Langsdorfii_ as being the original ancestor of this tree, or any other distinguished branch of the sequoias. How much more rational the suggestion of Professor Agassiz that these trees--the entire family of sequoias--were quite as numerous in individual varieties at first as now, and that the fruit of the one can never bear the fruit of the other.