4 ORIGIN OF VEGETATION IN NITHSDALE. 
So that we are, in physical science, well in the forefront of 
discovery. 
I wish I could honestly say as much for botany and the 
natural sciences. Almost all the interesting botanical discoveries 
of to-day have to be dredged and dug from the slime and 
tenacious clay of German botanical literature. The digger is 
generaliy so exhausted in the process that he cannot clean up 
and tidy his treasure so that the world may observe it. Even our 
own English botany is mostly inaccessible to the general reader, 
and there is a most distressing want of sympathy between the 
botanist and the practical man, such as the gardener, farmer, 
or forester. This is especially dangerous for the future of 
botanical science. 
All this makes our work as members of this society very 
difficult. But I will try to show you some of the many things 
which we can discover in this district. There is first the way in 
which societies of plants gradually occupied Nithsdale. These 
plant societies or associations may be compared to the hive of 
bees or to the body of the plant itself, for each plant in one of 
them has its own special work to do for the good of the whole. 
First, then, at the close of the Great Ice Age, some 200,000 
years ago, the climate was of the most terrible kind. Intense 
cold, almost daily gales and hurricanes with snow, sleet, and rain, 
drenching fogs, and occasionally hot blazing sunshine. There 
was no “soil,’’ in the gardener’s sense of that term, nothing but 
subsoil of rock, boulder clay, gravel, or sand. Moreover, this 
was permanently frozen hard and only thawed on the surface. 
The first immigrants would be pioneers which would be scattered, 
fixing themselves at distant intervals, wherever they could find 
a root hold. It would be what botanists call an open flora, the 
ground being visible between the plants. These first Arctic 
immigrants would consist of such plants as Scurvy Grass, 
Plantago maritima, Suaeda, Oraches, Chenopodium album, 
Glaux, Caltha palustris, Armeria, Matricaria inodora, etc. All 
these still occur along the seashores as they did then. Besides 
these there would be (2) water plants, such as Phragmites, various 
Reeds, Grasses, and Sedges; and (3) Mountain Saxifrages, Poly- 
gonum viviparum, Ferns, such as Woodsia and Cystopteris, 
Sedum Rodiola, Silene acaulis, Oxyria, Draba, Cerastium 
alpinum, Pyrolas, all of which are mountain plants. These, ex- 
