130 ALPINE FLOWERS AND GARDENS 



bringing back from their Alpine excursions living 

 souvenirs for the adornment of their rockeries, but 

 to arrest the professional collector's wholesale 

 depredations ; and, of course, this must be accepted 

 as exact. Nevertheless, the more modest pilferings 

 of the excursionist and tourist have been affected 

 by the movement quite as markedly, by comparison, 

 as have the wholesale plunderings of the professional 

 collector. The cause of the persecuted Alpines has 

 been won ; and it has been won not merely amongst 

 a particular section of the public, but also amongst 

 the mountain peasantry. A popular spirit of 

 patriotic pride in the country's flora has been 

 aroused, and, so to speak, poHces the mountains ; 

 consequently, every class of collector is alfected. 

 Nor, really, is this the least happy of the Society's 

 achievements. For the total amount of destruction 

 wrought by the whole vast army of tourists and 

 excm'sionists must have been great, although each 

 individual sum may have been smalL And most 

 often it was idle destruction — purely and simply 

 idle and unthinking. Lovers ha,ve still much to 

 learn of how to be loving ; and the lover of plants 

 can be as enthusiastically inconsiderate as any other 

 lover. Flower-loving tourists are more frequently 

 to be dreaded than they who are ' dead to love ' 



