have migrated to America. There were others that passed into Asia,
Africa, and even to Australia. The American types are, however, in the
largest proportion. The analogues of the flora of the Miocene Age of
Europe now grow in the forests of Virginia, North and South Carolina,
and Florida; they include such familiar examples as magnolias,
tulip-trees, evergreen oaks, maples, plane-trees, robinas, sequoias,
etc. It would seem to be impossible that these trees could have migrated
from Switzerland to America unless there was unbroken land communication
between the two continents.

It is a still more remarkable fact that a comparison of the flora of the
Old World and New goes to show that not only was there communication by
land, over which the plants of one continent could extend to another,
but that man must have existed, and have helped this transmigration, in
the case of certain plants that were incapable of making the journey
unaided.

Otto Kuntze, a distinguished German botanist, who has spent many years
in the tropics, announces his conclusion that "In America and in Asia
the principal domesticated tropical plants are represented by the same
species." He instances the Manihot utilissima, whose roots yield a fine
flour; the tarro (Colocasia esculenta), the Spanish or red pepper, the
tomato, the bamboo, the guava, the mango-fruit, and especially the
banana. He denies that the American origin of tobacco, maize, and the
cocoa-nut is proved. He refers to the Paritium tiliaceum, a malvaceous
plant, hardly noticed by Europeans, but very highly prized by the
natives of the tropics, and cultivated everywhere in the East and West
Indies; it supplies to the natives of these regions so far apart their
ropes and cordage. It is always seedless in a cultivated state. It
existed in America before the arrival of Columbus.