The distribution of the Tertiary and Cretaceous Sequoias would appear to have been mainly in the northern hemisphere, extending well within the Arctic circle. It is, however, by no means improbable that the ancestors of Sequoia flourished far south of the equator. Reference has been made to Jurassic fossils from Madagascar which have been compared with the existing species, and from Lower Tertiary beds in New Zealand the late Baron Ettingshausen described some cones and twigs as _Sequoia novae zeelandicae_ which bear a close resemblance to the existing type. The available evidence would seem to point to a northern origin of the genus, though allowance must be made for erroneous conclusions based on negative evidence. Further research may well extend the past distribution of Sequoia in southern lands, but the data to hand point to the conclusion that the Californian trees represent the survivors of a type which flourished in the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods over a wide area in North America and in what we now call the Continent of Europe. CHAPTER VII THE ARAUCARIA FAMILY 'And so the grandeur of the Forest-tree Comes not by casting in a formal mould, But from its own divine vitality.' Wordsworth. As an additional illustration of existing cone-bearing trees which form links with the past we may briefly consider the genera Araucaria and Agathis, the two members of the family Araucarieae. It is generally agreed that the branches of the genealogical tree of this family extended farther back into the past than in the case of the majority of Conifers. By some authors the surviving representatives of the Araucarian stock are considered to have a strong claim to be regarded as the most primitive as well as the oldest of cone-bearing trees, though this opinion, like many others, is not held by botanists as a whole. This is not the place to discuss matters of controversy, and I shall confine myself to a general consideration of Araucaria and Agathis from the point of view of their present distribution and the part they played in the vegetation of the Mesozoic and Tertiary epochs. In 1741 a plant from Amboyna, one of the Moluccas, was described under the name _Dammara alba_. For this tree, known as the Amboyna Fine, the English botanist Salisbury instituted the generic name Agathis, from a Greek word (αγαθις) meaning a ball of string and probably suggested by the form of the cones, which is the designation usually adopted in botanical literature instead of the pre-Linnean term Dammara. The best known species of the genus is the Kauri Pine, probably the finest forest tree in New Zealand where it still flourishes from the North Cape to latitude 38° S., though the occurrence of sub-fossil trunks and pieces of buried resin shows that the Kauri forests are gradually dwindling. The stems of this species, _Agathis australis_, rise like massive grey columns to a height of 160