Leaves of plants supposed to belong to the order Proteaceæ have been obtained partly from Œningen and partly from the lacustrine formation of the same age at Locle in the Jura. They have been referred to the genera _Banksia, Grevillea, Hakea,_ and _Persoonia._ Of Hakea there is the impression of a supposed seed-vessel, with its characteristic thick stalk and seeds, but as the fruit is without structure, and has not yet been found attached to the same stem as the leaf, the proof is incomplete. Fig. 142: Smilax sagittifera. To whatever family the foliage hitherto regarded as proteaceous by many able palæontologists may eventually be shown to belong, we must be careful not to question their affinity to that order of plants on those geographical considerations which have influenced some botanists. The nearest living Proteaceæ now feel the in Abyssinia in lat. 20° N., but the greatest number are confined to the Cape and Australia. The ancestors, however, of the Œningen fossils ought not to be looked for in such distant regions, but from that European land which in Lower Miocene times bore trees with similar foliage, and these had doubtless an Eocene source, for cones admitted by all botanists to be proteaceous have been met with in one division of that older Tertiary group (see Fig. 206). The source of these last, again, must not be sought in the antipodes, for in the white chalk of Aix-la-Chapelle leaves like those of Grevillea and other proteaceous genera have been found in abundance, and, as we shall see (p. 304) in a most perfect state of preservation. All geologists agree that the distribution of the Cretaceous land and sea had scarcely any connection with the present geography of the globe. Fig. 143: Fruit of the fossil and recent species of Hakea, a genus of Proteaceæ. In the same beds with the supposed Proteaceæ there occurs at Locle a fan-palm of the American type Sabal (for genus see Fig. 151), a genus which ranges throughout the low country near the sea from the Carolinas to Florida and Louisiana. Among the Coniferæ of Upper Miocene age is found a deciduous cypress nearly allied to the _Taxodium distichum_ of North America, and a _Glyptostrobus_ (Fig. 144), very like the Japanese _G. heterophyllus,_ now common in our shrubberies. Fig. 144: Glyptostrobus Europæus. Before the appearance of Heer’s work on the Miocene Flora of Switzerland, Unger and Goppert had already pointed out the large proportion of living North American genera which distinguished the vegetation of the Miocene period in Central Europe. Next in number, says Heer, to these American forms at Œningen the European genera preponderate, the Asiatic ranking in the third, the African in the fourth, and the Australian in the fifth degree. The American forms are more numerous than in the Italian Pliocene flora, and the whole vegetation indicates a warmer climate than the Pliocene, though not so high a temperature as that of the older or Lower Miocene period.