t free enough from ice to support a
vegetation of between 300 or 400 species of flowering plants; and,
therefore, he well says, we must be careful to avoid concluding that the
plant and animal life on the dreary shores or mountain-tops of the old
glacial Scotland was poor. The same would hold good of our mountains;
and, if so, we may look with respect, even with awe, on the Alpine plants
of Wales, Scotland, and the Lake mountains, as organisms stunted, it may
be, and even degraded, by their long battle with the elements; but
venerable from their age, historic from their endurance. Relics of an
older temperate world, they have lived through thousands of centuries of
frost and fog, to sun themselves in a temperate climate once more. I can
never pick one of them without a tinge of shame; and to exterminate one
of them is to destroy for the mere pleasure of collecting the last of a
family which God has taken the trouble to preserve for thousands of
centuries.

I trust that these hints--for I can call them nothing more--will at least
awaken any young naturalist who has hitherto only collected natural
objects, to study the really important and interesting question--How did
these things get here?

Now hence arise questions which may puzzle the mind of a Hampshire
naturalist. You have in this neighbourhood, as you well know, two, or
rather three, soils, each carrying its peculiar vegetation. First, you
have the clay lying on the chalk, and carrying vast woodlands, seemingly
primeval. Next, you have the chalk, with its peculiar, delicate, and
often fragrant crop of lime-loving plants; and next you have the poor
sands and clays of the New Forest basin, saturated with iron, and
therefore carrying a moorland or peat-loving vegetation, in many respects
quite different from the others. And this moorland soil, and this
vegetation, with a few singular exceptions, repeats itself, as I daresay
you know, in the north of the county, in the Bagshot basin, as it is
called--the moors of Aldershot, Hartford Bridge, and Windsor Forest.

Now what a variety of interesting questions are opened up by these simple
facts. How did these three floras get each to its present place? Where
did each come from? How did it get past or through the other, till each
set of plants, after long internecine competition, settled itself down in
the sheet of land most congenial to it? And when did each come hither?
Which is the oldest? Will any one tell