ins, and in America, save in Labrador, where the common ling,
an older and less specialised form, exists. You must consider, too,
the plants common to the Azores, Portugal, the West of England,
Ireland, and the Western Hebrides. In so doing young naturalists
will at least find proofs of a change in the distribution of land
and water, which will utterly astound them when they face it for the
first time.

As for the Northern flora, the question whence it came is puzzling
enough. It seems difficult to conceive how any plants could have
survived when Scotland was an archipelago in the same ice-covered
condition as Greenland is now; and we have no proof that there
existed after the glacial epoch any northern continent from which
the plants and animals could have come back to us. The species of
plants and animals common to Britain, Scandinavia, and North
America, must have spread in pre-glacial times when a continent
joining them did exist.

But some light has been thrown on this question by an article, as
charming as it is able, on "The Physics of the Arctic Ice," by Dr.
Brown of Campster. You will find it in the "Quarterly Journal of
the Geological Society" for February, 1870. He shows there that
even in Greenland peaks and crags are left free enough from ice to
support a vegetation of between three hundred or four hundred
species of flowering plants; and, therefore, he well says, we must
be careful to avoid concluding that the plant and animal life on the
dreary shores or mountain-tops of the old glacial Scotland was poor.
The same would hold good of our mountains; and, if so, we may look
with respect, even awe, on the Alpine plants of Wales, Scotland, and
the Lake mountains, as organisms, stunted it may be, and even
degraded by their long battle with the elements, but venerable from
their age, historic from their endurance. Relics of an older
temperate world, they have lived through thousands of centuries of
frost and fog, to sun themselves in a temperate climate once more.
I can never pick one of them without a tinge of shame; and to
exterminate one of them is to destroy, for the mere pleasure of
collecting, the last of a family which God has taken the trouble to
preserve for thousands of centuries.

I trust that these hints--for I can call them nothing more--will at
least awaken any young naturalist who has hitherto only collected
natural objects, to study the really important and interesting
question--How d