time the bridge connecting Asia and America was severed.<52>
In Europe the Mediterranean area was elevated; but the land
connecting Greenland with Europe sank, allowing the cold waters
of the Arctic to communicate with both the North Sea and the
Atlantic--England at that time forming part of the great
peninsula extending north and west from Europe.<53> The climate
during the Pliocene Age was cooler than that of the Miocene.
This is marked in the vegetation of that period. The palms and
the cinnamon trees, which in Miocene times grew in Germany,
flourished no farther north than Italy during the Pliocene.<54>

Count DeSaporta, who made special researches in the flora of
this period, found the remains of a forest growth buried under
lava on the side of a mountain in Cantal France, at an elevation
of about four thousand feet above the level of the sea.
This consisted principally of pines. This shows that probably
all Northern Europe was covered with somber forests of pine.
In the same section he found, buried under volcanic ash, a
vegetation consisting mostly of deciduous trees--maples, alders,
poplars, willows, elms, and ashes. As this was growing at the
height Of about twenty-three hundred feet in Cantal France, it
probably represents the vegetation of Britain and Northern
Germany. Finally, the vegetation of Central and Southern France,
as well as Northern Italy, was intermediate in character between
the luxuriant evergreen forests of the Miocene Age and that now
growing there. The tropical character of the vegetation was
evidently passing away. The climate over a large part of Europe
was now temperate, though probably warmer than at present.<55>

In the Mammalia we have to notice the disappearance of some