But it may be said these animals and plants may have passed from Asia to America across the Pacific by the continent of Lemuria; or there may have been continuous land communication at one time at Behring’s Strait.  True; but an examination of the flora of the Pacific States shows that 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 cloth.  It was also found in Mexico and Peru.  It is a significant fact that the cotton-plant has been found growing wild in many parts of America, but never in the Old World.  This would seem to indicate that the plant was a native of America; and this is confirmed by the superiority of American cotton, and the further fact that the plants taken from America to India constantly degenerate, while those taken from India to America as constantly improve.

There is a question whether the potato, maize, and tobacco were not cultivated in China ages before Columbus discovered America.  A recent traveller says, “The interior of China, along the course of the Yang-tse-Kiang, is a land full of wonders.  In one place piscicultural nurseries line the banks for nearly fifty miles.  All sorts of inventions, the cotton-gin included, claimed by Europeans and Americans, are to be found there forty centuries old.  Plants, yielding drugs of great value, without number, the familiar tobacco and potato, maize, white and yellow corn, and other plants believed to be indigenous to America, have been cultivated there from time immemorial.”