The pines present some features of interest. We have already seen their connection with the broad-leaved _Cordaites_, and in the Permian there are some additional types of broad-leaved coniferæ. In the Mesozoic we have great numbers of beautiful trees, with those elegant fan-shaped leaves characteristic of but one living species, the Salisburia, or gingko-tree of China. It is curious that this tree, though now limited to eastern Asia, will grow, though it rarely fruits, in most parts of temperate Europe, and in America as far north as Montreal, and that in the Mesozoic period it occupied all these regions, and even Siberia and Greenland, and with many and diversified species (Fig. 66). _Salisburia_ belongs to the yews, but an equally curious fact applies to the cypresses. The genus _Sequoia_, limited at present to two species, both Californian, and one of them the so-called "big tree," celebrated for the gigantic size to which it attains, is represented by species found as far back at least as the Lower Cretaceous, and in every part of the northern hemisphere.[DG] It seems to have thriven in all these regions throughout the Mesozoic and early Kainozoic, and then to have disappeared, leaving only a small remnant to represent it in modern days. A number of species have been described from the Mesozoic and Tertiary, all of them closely related to those now existing (Fig. 67). [DG] In the Eocene of Australia. [Illustration: Fig. 67.--_Sequoia Smithiana_, Heer. L. Cretaceous.] The following notice of these trees is for the most part translated, with some modifications and abridgment, from a paper read by the late Prof. Heer before the Botanical Section of the Swiss Natural History Society: The name itself deserves consideration. It is that of an Indian of the Cherokee tribe, Sequo Yah, who invented an alphabet without any aid from the outside world of culture, and taught it to his tribe by writing it upon leaves. This came into general use among the Cherokees, before the white man had any knowledge of it; and afterward, in 1828, a periodical was published in this character by the missionaries. Sequo Yah was banished from his home in Alabama, with the rest of his tribe, and settled in New Mexico, where he died in 1843. When Endlicher was preparing his synopsis of the conifers, in 1846, and had established a number of new genera, Dr. Jacbon Tschudi, then living with Endlicher, brought before his notice this remarkable man, and asked him to dedicate this red-wooded tree to the memory of a literary genius so conspicuous among the red men of America. Endlicher consented to do so, and only endeavored to make the name pronounceable by changing two of its letters.