An examination of the fossil beds of Switzerland of the Miocene Age reveals the remains of more than eight hundred different species of flower-bearing plants, besides mosses, ferns, etc.  The total number of fossil plants catalogued from those beds, cryptogamous as well as phaenogamous, is upward of three thousand.  The majority of these species 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.

But Professor Kuntze pays especial attention to the banana, or plantain.  The banana is seedless.  It is found throughout tropical Asia and Africa.  Professor Kuntze asks, “In what way was this plant, which cannot stand a voyage through the temperate zone, carried to America?” And yet it was generally cultivated in America before 1492.  Says Professor Kuntze, “It must be remembered that the plantain is a tree-like, herbaceous plant, possessing no easily transportable bulbs, like the potato or the dahlia, nor propagable by cuttings, like the willow or the poplar.  It has only a perennial root, which, once planted, needs hardly any care, and yet produces the most abundant crop of any known tropical plant.”  He then proceeds to discuss how it could have passed