. Plants of New Zealand. atures of the Family. The flowers of the order are small and inconspicuous, and as they are adaptedto wind pollination, have no special devices for attracting insects. Stamens andpistil are found on the same plant, but in different flowers. The male flowersare generally borne in catkins. —No older family of dicotyledonous trees than this is includes the birch, alder, hazel, hornbeam, beech, oak, and chestnut. Closelyallied to these are the willow, poplar, and walnut. The earliest oaks come fromthe Cretaceous, and were coeval with the first undoub
. Plants of New Zealand. atures of the Family. The flowers of the order are small and inconspicuous, and as they are adaptedto wind pollination, have no special devices for attracting insects. Stamens andpistil are found on the same plant, but in different flowers. The male flowersare generally borne in catkins. —No older family of dicotyledonous trees than this is includes the birch, alder, hazel, hornbeam, beech, oak, and chestnut. Closelyallied to these are the willow, poplar, and walnut. The earliest oaks come fromthe Cretaceous, and were coeval with the first undoubted dicotyledons. Themethod by which the poUen tube reaches the embryo sac in some plants of theorder is of a highly archaic type, known elsewhere only among the primitiveCasuariniae (she-oaks, etc.) of Australia. If antiquity, then, were a claim torepresentation in the New Zealand forests, this family should be conspicuousby the number of its species. It is, however, represented here only by some THE PEPPER FAMILY 129. Fig. 36. Macropiper excelsuiii (§ nat. size). 10 130 PLANTS OF NEW ZEALAND half-dozen species belonging to the southern genus Nothofagits, which is foundalso in South America and Australia. In the northern hemisphere on the otherhand, the family is very largely developed, and includes most of the importantdeciduous trees of North America and the Eurasian Continent. The forests,therefore, of the north temperate zone are really of older type than those ofsouth temperate regions. In South America, however, Nothofagns in many places forms as large acomponent of the flora as in New Zealand. Darwins description, in TheVovage of a Naturalist, of the forests of Tierra del Fuego, might well have beenwritten of some bush creek in south-western Otago. Replace Fagus betuloidesby a local species, and the Winters Bark by the closely allied Drimys axillaris,and the picture is now completely true for New Zealand. Probably nowhere else in the southern hemisphere could one fin
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