A MOUNT WASHINGTON SANDWORT. 597 



similar assemblage of mountain features. That dainty little plant is 

 tufted like a moss ; its leaves are as crowded as those of the sandwort, 

 and similar in shape, for like conditions always produce like results ; 

 and its purple blossoms grow in exactly the same wild profusion, 

 making the whole plant, during the flowering season, into one low 

 mat of brilliant bloom. The moss-campion is a perennial, and its close 

 habit and much-branched, creeping stem protect it from the severe 

 winter of New Hampshire, as from the Scotch snows and the frosts 

 of Switzerland. We have in Europe another precisely similar plant, 

 the Alpine lychnis, which one might almost at first sight confuse at a 

 distance with the moss-campion, so absolutely have they accommo- 

 dated themselves in the same way to the same environment ; and this 

 pretty pink flower, with its compactly clustered heads, has survived 

 only on two hill-tops in the British Isles — Little Kilrannoch, a mount- 

 ain in Forfarshire, and Hobcartin Fell, one of the least visited of our 

 Cambrian heights. Compare the case of the glacial American species 

 which still loiter round Willoughby Lake, or on the frozen heights of 

 Mount Katahdin in Maine. 



Every one of these mountain-plants exhibits in perfection the self- 

 same familiar mountain characteristics. Take, for example, the white 

 dryas {Dryas octopetala), a species of interest to American botanists 

 from the fact that in Pursli's time it still grew among the White 

 Mountains, though it has now disappeared entirely from the United 

 States, and can not be discovered south of Lower Canada. (Such 

 local disappearances, by-the-way, are everywhere common, more than 

 one rare local plant having been expunged from the British flora 

 within my own memory.) The dryas is a dwarf and matted perennial 

 herb or undershrub, growing in tufts just like the moss-campion, and 

 with starry white flowers to match the Greenland sandwort. Its short 

 and much-branched stems creep close upon the ground ; the prostrate 

 branches are crowded with dense foliage in spreading tufts. The 

 species, in fact, with the rest of its kind, is but a specialized mount- 

 ain form of avens ; and its flowers are white, not yellow, like most of 

 the avens group, in special adaptation to the butterfly taste ; for it is a 

 noteworthy fact that many genera which are yellow in the lowlands 

 tend to produce white and purple species when they rise among the 

 mountains or near the Arctic Circle. 



The moss-campion is a pink by family, while the dryas is a rose. 

 Now look once more at a member of a totally distinct order, the Lap- 

 land phlox, which also grows among the ice-worn bowlders of the 

 Presidential Range. The phloxes as a whole are tall and handsome, 

 large-leaved plants ; but the mountain kind (Diapensia Lapponica), 

 that still lingers on among the New Hampshire heights and the higher 

 Adirondacks, is an Alpine dwarf evergreen, growing in the regulation 

 dense convex tufts, a perfect mat of intricated leaves, from whose 

 little rosettes rise solitary large white blossoms, as handsome as the 



