594 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Mount "Washington, indeed, though the highest of all your North- 

 eastern peaks, is not by any means the best station in the States for 

 the plants of this old stranded glacier stratum. As you go from New 

 York to Montreal by the Memphremagog route, you pass near St. 

 Johnsbury a little station named West Burke, whence stages carry you 

 in a few miles to Willoughby Lake, one of the loveliest among all the 

 lovely sheets of water with which Northern Vermont is so copiously 

 dotted. The hills surrounding Willoughby Lake are rich in me- 

 mentoes of the Glacial Epoch. There, alone in the States, thanks to 

 combined latitude and elevation, the American botanist can pick at 

 leisure the beautiful tufted mountain saxifrage that purples with its 

 bloom the Highlands of Scotland in early spring. There, too, grows 

 its pretty yellow congener [Saxifrage aizoides), a circumpolar species 

 of both hemispheres, which descends in Europe as far south as the 

 Cambrian lakes. The Alpine rock-cress, the hoary whitlow-grass, 

 the purple astragalus, and many other high northern species, are also 

 almost confined in the States to "Willoughby Mountain, though reap- 

 pearing far to the north in British territory — either Canada or New- 

 foundland. Mount Katahdin, in Maine, ranks next as a refuge for 

 many good glacial species, including the beautiful little starry saxi- 

 frage {Saxifrage stellar is), whose slender blossoms spread in countless 

 numbers beside the rills and streams of the Scotch Highlands. 



Naturally, however, to a European visitor, such a plant as the 

 Greenland sandwort possesses a far deeper interest and importance 

 than these old friends of the Swiss or Scotch uplands. It is a native 

 American, local to the soil ; or, to speak more correctly, a rare exam- 

 ple of a glacial plant which has died out in distant Europe in spite of 

 the superior advantages there afforded to Alpine or sub-arctic species, 

 while it has lingered on in vigorous colonies over all the fitting districts 

 of America, from the riks of Greenland to the Catskills of New York. 

 Nay, more, in a slightly altered and adapted form, as the Arenaria 

 glabra of the systematic botanists, it has held its own even as far 

 south as the mountain-tops of Carolina — a glacial strayling stranded 

 almost alone on the chilliest summits of a sub-tropical land. The Caro- 

 lina type, as might naturally be expected, is a larger, handsomer, and 

 more luxuriant plant than the New Hampshire and Greenland variety, 

 but it does not differ in any point of real structural or systematic im- 

 portance from its pretty little sisters of more frozen climes. 



Very much the same thing is true of our other common Mount 

 Washington flower, the yellow avens that grows so abundantly in and 

 out among the thick-set beds of Greenland sandwort. This, too, is a 

 thorough-going native American type, though not a type of glacial 

 antecedents. What gave it its deepest interest in our eyes was the 

 very fact that, growing as it did side by side with those sub-arctic 

 plants, the bog-bilberry and the mountain saxifrage, the Alpine bear- 

 berry and the Lapland phlox, it yet exemplified the other main ele- 



