me whether the heathy flora of
the moors, or the thymy flora of the chalk downs, were the earlier
inhabitants of these isles? To these questions I cannot get any answer;
and they cannot be answered without first--a very careful study of the
range of each species of plant on the continent of Europe; and next,
without careful study of those stupendous changes in the shape of this
island which have taken place at a very late geological epoch. The
composition of the flora of our moorlands is as yet to me an utter
puzzle. We have Lycopodiums--three species--enormously ancient forms
which have survived the age of ice: but did they crawl downward hither
from the northern mountains, or upward hither from the Pyrenees? We have
the beautiful bog asphodel again--an enormously ancient form; for it is,
strange to say, common to North America and to Northern Europe, but does
not enter Asia--almost an unique instance. It must, surely, have come
from the north; and points--as do many species of plants and animals--to
the time when North Europe and North America were joined. We have,
sparingly, in North Hampshire, though, strangely, not on the Bagshot
moors, the Common or Northern Butterwort (_Pinguicula vulgaris_); and
also, in the south, the New Forest part of the county, the delicate
little _Pinguicula lusitanica_, the only species now found in Devon and
Cornwall, marking the New Forest as the extreme eastern limit of the
Atlantic flora. We have again the heaths, which, as I have just said,
are found neither in America nor in Asia, and must, I believe, have come
from some south-western land long since submerged beneath the sea. But
more, we have in the New Forest two plants which are members of the South
Europe, or properly, the Atlantic flora; which must have come from the
south and south-east; and which are found in no other spots in these
islands. I mean the lovely _Gladiolus_, which grows abundantly under the
ferns near Lyndhurst, certainly wild but it does not approach England
elsewhere nearer than the Loire and the Rhine; and next, that delicate
orchid, the _Spiranthes aestivalis_, which is known only in a bog near
Lyndhurst and in the Channel Islands, while on the Continent it extends
from southern Europe all through France. Now, what do these two plants
mark? They give us a point in botany, though not in time, to determine
when the south of England was parted from the opposite shores of France;
and whenever that was,