100 Dr, Dawson on the Flora 



tains, in arctic America, and on the hills of Scotland and Scan- 

 dinavia, but has been fotind on the Mexican Cordillera, and at 

 the Straits of Magellan. The seeds of this grass may perhaps be 

 specially suited for transportation by water as well as by land. 

 It is observed in Nova Scotia that when the wide flats of mud 

 deposited by the tides of the Bay of Fundy, are dyked in from the 

 sea, they soon become covered with grasses and carices, the seeds 

 of which are supposed to be washed down by streams and mingled 

 with the marine silt ; and fragments of grasses abound in the post- 

 tertiary clays of the Ottawa. 



It seems almost ridiculous thus to connect the persistence of the 

 form of a little plant with the subsidence and elevation of whole 

 continents, and the lapse of enormous periods of time. Yet the 

 power which preserves unchanged from generation to generation 

 the humblest animal or plant, is the same with that which causes 

 the permanence of the great laws of physical nature, and the 

 continued revolutions of the earth and all its companion spheres. 

 A little leaf entombed ages on ages ago in the Post-pliocene 

 clays of Canada, preserves in all its minutest features the precise 

 type of that of the same species as it now lives, after all the 

 ■prodigious geological changes that have intervened. An arctic 

 and alpine plant that has survived all these changes, maintains in 

 its now isolated and far removed stations, all its specific characters 

 unchanged. The flora of a mountain top is precisely what it 

 must have been when it was an island in the glacial seas. These 

 facts relate not to hard crystalline rocks that remain unaltered 

 from age to age, but to little delicate organisms that have many 

 thousands of times died and been renewed in the lapse of time. 

 They show us that what we call a species represents a decision of 

 the unchanging creative will, and that the group of qualities 

 which constitutes our idea of the species, goes on from generation 

 to generation animating new organisms constructed out of different 

 particles of matter. The individual dies but the species lives, and 

 will live until the Power that has decreed its creation shall have 

 decreed its extinction ; or until in the slow process of physical 

 change depending on another section of His laws, it shall have 

 been excluded from the possibility of existence anywhere on the 

 surface of the earth. 



While the huge ribs of mother earth that project into moun- 

 tain summits, and the grand and majestic movement of the crea- 

 tive processes by which they have been formed, speak to us of 



