Other plants equally illustrate the decadence of important types of vegetable life. In the beautiful family of the Magnolias there exists in America a most remarkable and elegant tree, whose trunk attains sometimes a diameter of 7 feet and a height of 80 or 90 feet. Its broad deep green leaves are singularly truncate at the end, as if artificially cut off, and in spring it puts forth a wealth of large and brilliant orange and yellow flowers, from which it obtains the name of Tulip tree. It is the _Liriodendron tulipifera_ of botanists, and the sole species of its genus. This Tulip tree has a history. All through the Tertiary beds we find leaves referable to the genus, and belonging not to one species only, but to several, and as we go back into the Cretaceous, the species seem to become more numerous. Many of them have smaller leaves than the modern species, others larger, and some have forms even more quaint than that of the existing Tulip tree. The oldest that I have seen in Canada is one from the Upper Cretaceous of Port McNeil in the north of Vancouver Island, which is as large as that of the modern species, and very similar in form. Thus this beautiful vegetable type culminated long geological ages ago, and was represented by many species, no doubt occupying a prominent place in the forests of the northern hemisphere. To-day only a single species exists, in our warmer regions, to keep up the memory of this almost perished genus; but that species is one of our most beautiful trees. The history of the Sequoias or giant Cypresses, of which two species now exist in limited areas in California, is still more striking. These giant trees, monsters of the vegetable kingdom, are, strange to say, very limited in their geographical range. The greater of the two, _Sequoia gigantea_, the giant tree _par excellence_, seems limited to a few groves in California. At first sight this strikes us as anomalous, especially as we find that the tree will grow somewhat widely both in Europe and America when its seeds are sown in suitable soil. The mystery is solved when we learn that the two existing species are but survivors of a genus once diffused over the whole northern hemisphere, and represented by many species, constituting, in the Later Cretaceous and Eocene ages, vast and dark forests extending over enormous areas of our continents, and forming much of the material of the thick and widely distributed Lignite beds of North-western America. Thus the genus has had its time of expansion and prevalence, and is now probably verging on extinction, not because there are not suitable habitats, but either because it is now old and moribund, or because other and newer forms have now a preference in the existing conditions of existence.