illow
remains laid down all the year and always. But in summer it sends up
its short-lived herbaceous branches, covered with tiny green leaves,
and ending at last in a single silky catkin. Yet between the great
weeping willow and this last degraded mountain representative of the
same primitive type, you can trace in Europe alone at least a dozen
distinct intermediate forms, all well marked in their differences, and
all progressively dwarfed by long stress of unfavourable conditions.

From the combination of such unfavourable conditions in Arctic
countries and under the snow-line of mountains there results a curious
fact, already hinted at above, that the coldest floras are also, from
the purely human point of view, the most beautiful. Not, of course, the
most luxuriant: for lush richness of foliage and 'breadth of tropic
shade' (to quote a noble lord) one must go, as everyone knows, to the
equatorial regions. But, contrary to the common opinion, the tropics,
hoary shams, are not remarkable for the abundance or beauty of their
flowers. Quite otherwise, indeed: an unrelieved green strikes the
keynote of equatorial forests. This is my own experience, and it is
borne out (which is far more important) by Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace,
who has seen a wider range of the untouched tropics, in all four
hemispheres--northern, southern, eastern, western--than any other man,
I suppose, that ever lived on this planet. And Mr. Wallace is firm in
his conviction that the tropics in this respect are a complete fraud.
Bright flowers are there quite conspicuously absent. It is rather in
the cold and less favoured regions of the world that one must look for
fine floral displays and bright masses of colour. Close up to the
snow-line the wealth of flowers is always the greatest.

In order to understand this apparent paradox one must remember that the
highest type of flowers, from the point of view of organisation, is not
at the same time by any means the most beautiful. On the contrary,
plants with very little special adaptation to any particular insect,
like the water-lilies and the poppies, are obliged to flaunt forth in
very brilliant hues, and to run to very large sizes in order to attract
the attention of a great number of visitors, one or other of whom may
casually fertilise them; while plants with very special adaptations,
like the sage and mint group, or the little English orchids, are so
cunningly arranged that they can't fail of ferti