elonging to this secondary stratum of our British
population are few and rare, but of its plants there are not a few, some
of them extending over the whole western shores of England, Wales,
Scotland, and Ireland, wherever they are washed by the Gulf Stream, and
others now confined to particular spots, often with the oddest apparent
capriciousness. Thus, two or three southern types of clover are peculiar
to the Lizard Point, in Cornwall; a little Spanish and Italian
restharrow has got stranded in the Channel Islands and on the Mull of
Galloway; the spotted rock-rose of the Mediterranean grows only in
Kerry, Galway, and Anglesea; while other plants of the same warm habit
are confined to such spots as Torquay, Babbicombe, Dawlish, Cork,
Swansea, Axminster, and the Scilly Isles. Of course, all peninsulas and
islands are warmer in temperature than inland places, and so these
relics of the lost Lyonesse have survived here and there in Cornwall,
Carnarvonshire, Kerry, and other very projecting headlands long after
they have died out altogether from the main central mass of Britain.
South-western Ireland in particular is almost Portuguese in the general
aspect of its fauna and flora.

Third and latest of all in time, though almost contemporary with the
southern type, is the central European or Germanic element in our
population. Sad as it is to confess it, the truth must nevertheless be
told, that our beasts and birds, our plants and flowers, are for the
most part of purely Teutonic origin. Even as the rude and hard-headed
Anglo-Saxon has driven the gentle, poetical, and imaginative Celt ever
westward before him into the hills and the sea, so the rude and vigorous
Germanic beasts and weeds have driven the gentler and softer southern
types into Wales and Cornwall, Galloway and Connemara. It is to the
central European population that we owe or owed the red deer, the wild
boar, the bear, the wolf, the beaver, the fox, the badger, the otter,
and the squirrel. It is to the central European flora that we owe the
larger part of the most familiar plants in all eastern and southeastern
England. They crossed in bands over the old land belt before Britain was
finally insulated, and they have gone on steadily ever since, with true
Teutonic persistence, overrunning the land and pushing slowly westward,
like all other German bands before or since, to the detriment and
discomfort of the previous inhabitants. Let us humbly remember that we
are