The forests of central France in Pliocene times, as well as those of the valley of the Arno in northern Italy, were very similar to the forests of the middle United States at the present time, comprising such trees as the sassafras, the locust, the honey-locust, the sumach, the bald cypress, and the tulip. Thus the regions which harbored the rich forest and meadow fauna of northern Italy in Upper Pliocene times abounded in trees familiar to-day in North and South Carolina, including even such distinctively American forms as the sweet gum (_Liquidambar styraciflua_), the sour gum (_Nyssa sylvatica_), and the bay, beside those above mentioned. To the south, along the Mediterranean, there also flourished trees incident to a more tropical climate, the bamboo, the sabal palm, and the dwarf fan-palm; most interesting is the presence of the sabal, which now flourishes in the subtropical rain forests of central Florida. The sequoia also was abundant. Toward the close of the Pliocene the first indications of the coming Glacial Epoch were a lowering of the temperature, and, in the higher mountainous areas perhaps, a beginning of the glacial stages. The ancestors of the modern forests of Europe predominated in central France: the oak, the beech, the poplar, the willow, and the larch. It is these forests, which survived the vicissitudes of glacial times, that gave descent to the forests of Postglacial Europe, while all the purely American types disappeared from Europe and are now found only in the temperate regions of the United States.(5) We have seen that anthropoid apes have not been discovered either in the Middle or Upper Pliocene of Europe; the gibbon-ape line disappears with the _Pliohylobates_ of the Upper Pliocene. These animals are, however, rarely found in fossil form, owing to their retreat to the trees in times of flood and danger, so that we need not necessarily assume that the anthropoids had actually become extinct in France. The primates which are found in the Upper Pliocene belong to the lower types of the Old World monkeys, related to the living langur of India and to the macaque and baboon. The evidence, as far as it goes, indicates that the ancestors of man were at this time evolving in Asia and not in Europe. This evidence, nevertheless, would be completely offset if it could be proven that the eoliths, or primitive flints, found in various parts of Europe from Oligocene to Pleistocene times are really artifacts of human or prehuman origin.