There was still a distinctive presence of the towering
conifers, something such as are represented in the redwood forests of
California to-day, or, in other forms, in some Australian woods. There
was a suggestion of the fernlike but gigantic age of growth of the
distant past, the past when the earth's surface was yet warm and its air
misty, and there was an exuberance of all plant and forest growth,
something compared with which the growth in the same latitude, just now,
would make, it may be, but a stunted showing. It is wonderful, though,
the close resemblance between most of the trees of the cave man's age, so
many tens of thousands of years ago, and the trees most common to the
temperate zone to-day. The peat bogs and the caverns and the strata of
deposits in a host of places tell truthfully what trees grew in this
distant time. Already the oak and beech and walnut and butternut and
hazel reared their graceful forms aloft, and the ground beneath their
spreading branches was strewn with the store of nuts which gave a portion
of food for many of the beasts and for man as well. The ash and the yew
were there, tough and springy of fiber and destined in the far future to
become famous in song and story, because they would furnish the wood from
which was made the weapon of the bowman.
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