it was just after the Gladiolus and Spiranthes got
hither. Two little colonies of these lovely flowers arrived just before
their retreat was cut off. They found the country already occupied with
other plants; and, not being reinforced by fresh colonists from the
south, have not been able to spread farther north than Lyndhurst. Thus,
in the New Forest, and, I may say, in the Bagshot moors, you find plants
which you do not expect, and do not find plants which you do expect; and
you are, or ought to be, puzzled, and I hope also interested, and stirred
up to find out more.

I spoke just now of the time when England was joined to France, as
bearing on Hampshire botany. It bears no less on Hampshire zoology. In
insects, for instance, the presence of the purple emperor and the white
admiral in our Hampshire woods, as well as the abundance of the great
stag-beetle, point to a time when the two countries were joined, at
least, as far west as Hampshire; while the absence of these insects
farther to the westward shows that the countries, if ever joined, were
already parted; and that those insects have not yet had time to spread
westward. The presence of these two butterflies, and partly of the stag-
beetle, along the south-east coast of England as far as the primeval
forests of South Lincolnshire, points--as do a hundred other facts--to a
time when the Straits of Dover either did not exist, or were the bed of a
river running from the west; and when, as I told you just now, all the
rivers which now run into the German Ocean, from the Humber on the west
to the Elbe on the east, discharged themselves into the sea between
Scotland and Norway, after wandering through a vast lowland, covered with
countless herds of mammoth, rhinoceros, gigantic ox, and other mammals
now extinct; while the birds, as far as we know; the insects; the fresh-
water fish; and even, as my friend Mr. Brady has proved, the
_Entomostraca_ of the rivers, were the same in what is now Holland as in
what is now our Eastern counties. I could dwell long on this matter. I
could talk long about how certain species of _Lepidoptera_--moths and
butterflies--like _Papilio Machaon_ and _P. Podalirius_, swarm through
France, reach up to the British Channel, and have not crossed it; with
the exception of one colony of _Machaon_ in the Cambridgeshire fens. I
could talk long about a similar phenomenon in the case of our migratory
and singing birds: how many exquisite spe