596 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



beautiful while it lasts, with their profuse bloom, a hundred times 

 more vivid and pervasive than anything to be seen in those much 

 overpraised and misrepresented tropics. Even in temperate Europe 

 and America, everybody must have noticed that, as we go up the 

 higher hills, we find their slopes purpled with heather or golden with 

 gorse, pink with mountain-laurel, or crimson with masses of the wild 

 rhododendron. 



Why is this ? Simply because among the uplands and more espe- 

 cially close to the snow-line, bees are rare, and the work of fertiliza- 

 tion is mainly left to the care of butterflies. Now, the bee, as every- 

 body knows, is a steady, regular, business-like worker : he flies low, 

 hunts close, never mixes his liquors, sticks steadily to one kind of 

 honey produced by one species on each journey, and looks carefully 

 for his selected blossom in and out among the tangled vegetation of 

 meadow or road-side. Hence the flowers that specially cater for his 

 peculiar tastes are more remarkable for their exact adaptation to his 

 size and shape than for any conspicuous floral display. But the but- 

 terfly, on the other hand, is well known to be a fickle, flitting, fantas- 

 tic creature : he flies high from bunch to bunch of large and notice- 

 able bright-hued flowers. Above all other members of the insect 

 tribe, he is a lover of color : big patches of red or white or purple 

 are the things to attract him from a distance with their massive glare, 

 and to draw him down from his careless flight in the eye of heaven. 

 Hence butterfly flowers generally grow in huge trusses, massed closely 

 together to re-enforce one another's effect ; and they produce the finest 

 total displays of any species known to humanity. On the hill-tops, 

 and especially close above the limit of trees, the high-flying butterflies 

 have things all their own way. The plants that affect these chilly 

 situations, therefore, have before been compelled to accommodate 

 themselves to the circumstances, and to trust for fertilization to 

 the stray attentions of the casual butterfly. It is not without reason, 

 then, that on the summit of Mount Washington a specialized and 

 peculiar glacial butterfly should still accompany the specialized and 

 peculiar glacial flowers. 



Our Greenland sandwort, indeed, may be taken as a very good 

 representative of the qualities necessary for ultimate success in a high- 

 mountain plant. It grows low, in densely tufted masses, ixnlike the 

 majority of its family, the Alshice ; and thus it escapes both the 

 rapid winds that career so madly round the summits of the Presiden- 

 tial Range, and the frosts of winter from which the snow efficiently 

 protects its humble branches. Its blossoms rise in immense numbers 

 from every tuft, so as to whiten the ground wherever it grows ; and 

 the petals are immense for the size of the plant, to act as an adver- 

 tisement to the passing butterfly. Turn from it for a moment to the 

 beautiful moss-campion (Silene acaidis) which grows close by among 

 the crannies of the Mount Washington rocks, and you get a precisely 



