itchen that rare insect, the
Oriental cockroach, lately imported; and Mr. Brewer observed with joy
in his garden at Reigate the blue Buxbaum speedwell, which is now the
acknowledged and hated pest of the Surrey agriculturist.

The history of some of these waifs and strays which go to make up the
wider population of Britain is indeed sufficiently remarkable. Like all
islands, England has a fragmentary fauna and flora, whose members have
often drifted towards it in the most wonderful and varied manner.
Sometimes they bear witness to ancient land connections, as in the case
of the spotted Portuguese slug which Professor Allman found calmly
disporting itself on the basking cliffs in the Killarney district. In
former days, when Spain and Ireland joined hands in the middle of the
Bay of Biscay, the ancestors of this placid Lusitanian mollusk must have
ranged (good word to apply to slugs) from the groves of Cintra to the
Cove of Cork. But, as time rolled on, the cruel crawling sea rolled on
also, and cut away all the western world from the foot of the Asturias
to Macgillicuddy's Reeks. So the spotted slug continued to survive in
two distinct and divided bodies, a large one in South-western Europe,
and a small isolated colony, all alone by itself, around the Kerry
mountains and the Lakes of Killarney. At other times pure accident
accounts for the presence of a particular species in the mainlands of
Britain. For example, the Bermuda grass-lily, a common American plant,
is known in a wild state nowhere in Europe save at a place called
Woodford, in county Galway. Nobody ever planted it there; it has simply
sprung up from some single seed, carried over, perhaps, on the feet of a
bird, or cast ashore by the Gulf Stream on the hospitable coast of
Western Ireland. Yet there it has flourished and thriven ever since, a
naturalised British subject of undoubted origin, without ever spreading
to north or south above a few miles from its adopted habitat.

There are several of these unconscious American importations in various
parts of Britain, some of them, no doubt, brought over with seed-corn or
among the straw of packing-cases, but others unconnected in any way with
human agency, and owing their presence here to natural causes. That
pretty little Yankee weed, the claytonia, now common in parts of
Lancashire and Oxfordshire, first made its appearance amongst us, I
believe, by its seeds being accidentally included with the sawdust in
whic