very many of the trees and plants common to Europe and the Atlantic
States are not to be seen west of the Rocky Mountains. The magnificent
magnolias, the tulip-trees, the plane-trees, etc., which were found
existing in the Miocene Age in Switzerland, and are found at the present
day in the United States, are altogether lacking on the Pacific coast.
The sources of supply of that region seem to have been far inferior to
the sources of supply of the Atlantic States. Professor Asa Gray tells
us that, out of sixty-six genera and one hundred and fifty-five species
found in the forests cast of the Rocky Mountains, only thirty-one genera
and seventy-eight species are found west of the mountains. The Pacific
coast possesses no papaw, no linden or basswood, no locust-trees, no
cherry-tree large enough for a timber tree, no gum-trees, no
sorrel-tree, nor kalmia; no persimmon-trees, not a holly, only one ash
that may be called a timber tree, no catalpa or sassafras, not a single
elm or hackberry, not a mulberry, not a hickory, or a beech, or a true
chestnut. These facts would seem to indicate that the forest flora of
North America entered it from the east, and that the Pacific States
possess only those fragments of it that were able to struggle over or
around the great dividing mountain-chain.

We thus see that the flora and fauna of America and Europe testify not
only to the existence of Atlantis, but to the fact that in an earlier
age it must have extended from the shores of one continent to those of
the other; and by this bridge of land the plants and animals of one
region passed to the other.

The cultivation of the cotton-plant and the manufacture of its product
was known to both the Old and New World. Herodotus describes it (450
B.C.) as the tree of India that bears a fleece more beautiful than that
of the sheep. Columbus found the natives of the West Indies using cotton