warmth to support their existence. In Europe, however, they were stopped—first by the barrier of the Alps, and then by the still more effectual barrier of the Mediterranean. On the Pacific slope of America, they mostly perished owing to the extreme narrowness of their habitat, which allowed of no free emigration in any direction. The conditions of Eastern America and of Eastern Asia were altogether different. Here were neither mountain ranges nor oceans to obstruct the southward march of the vegetation as it retreated before the ice; and when the ice had disappeared, all the heat-loving forms, safely preserved in the south, were able to return northward again, a considerable remnant of the richer vegetation of an earlier geological age being thus handed down to our own days in these two favoured regions.
A consideration to which little attention has hitherto been paid is the general identity of the Japanese flora with that of the adjacent coast of Asia. It is probable that when Korea shall have been thoroughly explored, not a few species now designated as japonica will be found to be really continental forms. It is already known that some of the plants now most common in Japan have been introduced in historical times through human agency. Such are, to name but two, the tea-plant and the orange-tree. The introduction of the latter is mentioned by the Japanese poets of the eighth century. The tea-plant came in with Buddhism. We were ourselves, we believe, the first to point out, some twenty years ago, the help which philology can give to natural science in this field, by proving that plants and also animals now inhabiting Japan, but originally imported from China or Korea, may often be detected in the Japanese language by their slightly corrupted Chinese or Korean names.[1]
What we have for shortness sake termed the Japanese region, is named by Rein "the north-eastern monsoon region," and is furthermore described by him as the "kingdom of magnolias,
- ↑ See the "Asiatic Transactions," Vol. X. Supplement, p. 70 of the Introduction ft the Kojiki.
