id these things get here?

Now hence arise questions which may puzzle the mind of a Hampshire
naturalist. You have in this neighbourhood, as you well know, two,
or rather three, soils, each carrying its peculiar vegetation.
First, you have the clay lying on the chalk, and carrying vast
woodlands, seemingly primeval. Next, you have the chalk, with its
peculiar, delicate, and often fragrant crop of lime-loving plants;
and next, you have the poor sands and clays of the New Forest basin,
saturated with iron, and therefore carrying a moorland or peat-
loving vegetation, in many respects quite different from the others.
And this moorland soil, and this vegetation, with a few singular
exceptions, repeats itself, as I daresay you know, in the north of
the county, in the Bagshot basin, as it is called--the moors of
Aldershot, Hartford Bridge, and Windsor Forest.

Now what a variety of interesting questions are opened up by these
simple facts. How did these three floras get each to its present
place? Where did each come from? How did it get past or through
the other, till each set of plants, after long internecine
competition, settled itself down in the sheet of land most congenial
to it? And when did each come hither? Which is the oldest? Will
any one tell me whether the healthy floras of the moors, or the
thymy flora of the chalk downs, were the earlier inhabitants of
these isles? To these questions I cannot get any answer; and they
cannot be answered without, first--a very careful study of the range
of each species of plant on the continent of Europe; and next,
without careful study of those stupendous changes in the shape of
this island which have taken place at a very late geological epoch.
The composition of the flora of our moorlands is as yet to me an
utter puzzle. We have Lycopodiums--three species--enormously
ancient forms which have survived the age of ice: but did they
crawl downward hither from the northern mountains or upward hither
from the Pyrenees? We have the beautiful bog asphodel again--an
enormously ancient form; for it is, strange to say, common to North
America and to Northern Europe, but does not enter Asia--almost an
unique instance. It must, surely, have come from the north; and
points--as do many species of plants and animals--to the time when
North Europe and North America were joined. We have, sparingly, in
North Hampshire, though, strangely, not on the Bagshot moors, the
Common or No