EIGH LIFE. 113 



nook, every jutting point or wee promontory of shelter. And as 

 the mountain plants have been accustomed for ages to the strenu- 

 ous conditions of such cold and wind-swept situations, they have 

 ended, of course, by adapting themselves to that station in life to 

 which it has pleased the powers that be to call them. They grow 

 quite naturally low and stumpy and rosette-shaped; they are 

 compact of form and very hard of fiber ; they present no surface 

 of resistance to the wind in any way ; rounded and boss-like, they 

 seldom rise above the level of the rocks and stones whose inter- 

 stices they occupy. It is this combination of characters that 

 makes mountain plants such favorites with florists ; for they 

 possess of themselves that close-grown habit and that rich profu- 

 sion of clustered flowers which it is the grand object of the gar- 

 dener by artificial selection to produce and encourage. 



When one talks of " the limit of trees " on a mountain-side, 

 however, it must be remembered that the phrase is used in a 

 strictly human or Pickwickian sense, and that it is only the size, 

 not the type, of the vegetation that is really in question. For 

 trees exist even on the highest hill-tops; only they have accom- 

 modated themselves to the exigencies of the situation. Smaller 

 and ever smaller species have been developed by natural selection 

 to suit the peculiarities of these inclement spots. Take, for ex- 

 ample, the willow and poplar group. Nobody would deny that a 

 weeping willow by an English river, or a Lombardy poplar in an 

 Italian avenue, was as much of a true tree as an oak or a chest- 

 nut. But as one mounts toward the bare and wind-swept mount- 

 ain heights one finds that the willows begin to grow downward 

 gradually. The " netted willow " of the Alps and Pyrenees, 

 which shelters itself under the lee of little jutting rocks, attains 

 a height of only a few inches; while the "herbaceous willow," 

 common on all very high mountains in western Europe, is a 

 tiny, creeping weed, which nobody would ever take for a forest 

 tree by origin at all, unless he happened to see it in the catkin- 

 bearing stage, when its true nature and history would become at 

 once apparent to him. 



Yet this little herb-like willow, one of the most northerly and 

 hardy of European plants, is a true tree at heart none the less for 

 all that. Soft and succulent as it looks in branch and leaf, you 

 may yet count on it sometimes as many rings of annual growth 

 as on a lordly Scotch fir tree. But where ? Why, underground. 

 For see how cunning it is, this little stunted descendant of proud 

 forest lords : hard-pressed by Nature, it has learned to make the 

 best of its difficult and precarious position. It has a woody trunk 

 at core, like all other trees ; but this trunk never appears above 

 the level of the soil : it creeps and roots underground in tortuous 

 zigzags between the crags and bowlders that lie strewn through 



VOL. XL. — 10 



