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 Northern Butterwort (Pinguicula vulgaris); and also, in
the south, the New Forest part of the county, the delicate little
Pinguicula lusitanica, the only species now found in Devon and
Cornwall, marking the New Forest as the extreme eastern limit of the
Atlantic flora. We have again the heaths, which, as I have just
said, are found neither in America nor in Asia, and must, I believe,
have come from some south-western land long since submerged beneath
the sea. But more, we have in the New Forest two plants which are
members of the South Europe, or properly, the Atlantic flora; which
must have come from the south and south-east; and which are found in
no other spots in these islands. I mean the lovely Gladiolus, which
grows abundantly under the ferns near Lyndhurst, certainly wild, but
it does not approach England elsewhere nearer than the Loire and the