A MOUNT WASHINGTON SANDWORT. 591 



great ridge, that all the passengers were filling their hands with big 

 nosegays to carry away as mementoes of the mountains. The sand- 

 wort in particular starred all the crannies among the rifted rocks with 

 its delicate blossoms, and brightened up the otherwise bare and for- 

 bidding soil with the mingled green and white of its densely tufted 

 bunches. Arenaria Grcenlandica is its scientific name — a name that 

 tells at once the better part of its curious history ; for this little plant 

 belongs by rights to the frozen shores of far northern Greenland, and 

 the little colony that lingers on here in the clefts of the rock has lived 

 on the chilly summits of the White Mountains ever since the close of 

 the Glacial Epoch. 



There are many other flowers on the slopes of Mount Washington 

 far more full of interest to the American botanist than this Greenland 

 sandwort, because far more isolated in the New World, and far more 

 difficult for him to find elsewhere. The sandwort occurs abundantly 

 on several other mountain-summits in the States, being found on the 

 Shawangunks, the Catskills, and the Adirondacks, as well as in the 

 Green Mountains and on the higher peaks round Lake Memphremagog. 

 At Bath, Maine, it even appears on river-bank3 near the sea, and 

 farther northward, in Labrador and Greenland, it becomes a common 

 plant of the plains and uplands. But the Alpine brook saxifrage 

 {Saxifrage rivularis) confines itself in the States entirely to Mount 

 Washington, as its beautiful congener, the purple saxifrage (S. oppo- 

 sitifolia), does to the rocky crags of Willoughby Mountain in North- 

 ern Vermont. So, too, the little creeping mountain potentilla of the 

 Scotch Highlands {Slbbaldia procitmbens) is only found in the United 

 States on the Presidential Range of the White Mountains. There are 

 many of these Alpine or sub-Alpine plants which the American botan- 

 ist can pick here, and here only, unless he chooses to wend his way to 

 the frozen shores of the far North in chilly Labrador and the Hudson 

 Bay Territory. Yet, to the English naturalist, they are comparatively 

 uninteresting, for they form part of the common European mountain 

 flora, which reappears on all the higher peaks of his own continent, 

 from the Alps and the Caucasus to the Norwegian fjelds and the 

 Scotch Highlands. To him, then, these two native American upland 

 plants present far more numerous points of interest, because this is the 

 only place in the civilized world where he can hope to find them ready 

 to his hand, as representatives of the truly northern New- World flora. 



The general aspect of vegetation on the higher levels of the White 

 Mountains, indeed, is distinctly subarctic, or, to give its truer name, 

 as I prefer to say, glacial. Besides the common sun-dews and the grass 

 of Parnassus, which always follow the upland' bogs of northern cli- 

 mates on both sides the Atlantic, Mount Washington and his neigh- 

 bors possess a large number of chilly plants, like the Norwegian cloud- 

 berry (Rubies chamoemorus), the Alpine willow-herb (Epilobium Al- 

 pinum), the dwarf rattlesnake-root (Nabalus nanus), the mountain 



