Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/105

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The vegetation of central and southern France, and of northern Italy in the Pleiocene age, is intermediate in character between the wonderful evergreen flora of the Meiocene and that now living in southern Europe; and, like the former, it is composed of plants, some of which are found only in widely remote districts, such as Japan, North America, Madeira, and the Canaries. The recent investigations of the Count de Saporta into the flora of Meximieux show that the forests which covered the neighbourhood of Lyons comprised bamboos, liquid-ambars, rose-laurels, tulip-trees, large-leaved maples, ilices, and glyptostrobi, together with magnolias, poplars, willows, and other familiar trees. There were no less than five kinds of laurels, among which may be noted the til and the vinatico, two trees growing in the forests of the Canaries, and no longer living in Europe. The forest composed by this vegetation was mainly evergreen, and like that of the Canaries in luxuriance.

This Pleiocene forest has been proved, by the re- searches of M. Gaudin and the Marquis Strozzi, to have extended into the upper valley of the Arno, and to be composed for the most part of the same trees as those mentioned above. It probably occupied a region but little removed above the sea-level in middle Europe, since the Count de Saporta has shown that the Pleiocene vegetation of Ceyssac in Cantal, which lies buried under volcanic ash, is of a very different character, consisting,