ncient fauna and flora, left
behind soon after the Glacial Epoch, and perhaps in part a relic of the
type which still struggled on in favoured spots during that terrible
period of universal ice and snow, now survives for the most part only in
the extreme north and on the highest and chilliest mountain-tops, where
it has gradually been driven, like tourists in August, by the increasing
warmth and sultriness of the southern lowlands. The summits of the
principal Scotch hills are occupied by many Arctic plants, now slowly
dying out, but lingering yet as last relics of that old native British
flora. The Alpine milk vetch thus loiters among the rocks of Braemar and
Clova; the Arctic brook-saxifrage flowers but sparingly near the summit
of Ben Lawers, Ben Nevis, and Lochnagar; its still more northern ally,
the drooping saxifrage, is now extinct in all Britain, save on a single
snowy Scotch height, where it now rarely blossoms, and will soon become
altogether obsolete. There are other northern plants of this first and
oldest British type, like the Ural oxytrope, the cloudberry, and the
white dryas, which remain as yet even in the moors of Yorkshire, or over
considerable tracts in the Scotch Highlands; there are others restricted
to a single spot among the Welsh hills, an isolated skerry among the
outer Hebrides, or a solitary summit in the Lake District. But wherever
they linger, these true-born Britons of the old rock are now but
strangers and outcasts in the land; the intrusive foreigner has driven
them to die on the cold mountain-tops, as the Celt drove the Mongolian
to the hills, and the Saxon, in turn, has driven the Celt to the
Highlands and the islands. Yet as late as the twelfth century itself,
even the true reindeer, the Arctic monarch of the Glacial Epoch, was
still hunted by Norwegian jarls of Orkney on the mainland of Caithness
and Sutherlandshire.

Second in age is the warm western and south-western type, the type
represented by the Portuguese slug, the arbutus trees and Mediterranean
heaths of the Killarney district, the flora of Cornwall and the Scilly
Isles, and the peculiar wild flowers of South Wales, Devonshire, and the
west country generally. This class belongs by origin to the submerged
land of Lyonesse, the warm champaign country that once spread westward
over the Bay of Biscay, and derived from the Gulf Stream the genial
climate still preserved by its last remnants at Tresco and St. Mary's.
The animals b