ERITRICHIUM TERGLOVIENSE. 
does not travel so far—a smaller, much tighter-tufted form, with 
narrower foliage and fewer flowers to the spray; but the American 
distribution is prolonged by #. Howardii in the high Alps of Colorado 
and Wyoming. ‘This is a beautiful dense tuft with narrow spoon- 
shaped leaves clothed in short silver fur, and with larger brilliant 
blossoms. Rather smaller in the star, and much narrower in the foliage, 
and clad in long white hair, is 7. argentewm from the same ranges, 
while #. rupestre in the Altai has specially narrow leaves in a close 
clump, and vested in a velvet hoar of tight-pressed silver hairs. And 
it is not easy to doubt, indeed, that one might almost as readily 
differentiate a fresh named species on each district of the Alps where 
E. nanum occurs. 
Of this there is no need to speak, to those who have seen it; no 
profit, but vain temptation only, in speaking of it to those who have 
not. For no eye of faith is quite keen enough to gulp the whole 
glory of the King of the Alps, as you see those irresistible wads of 
silky silver nestling into the highest darkest ridges of the granite, and 
almost hidden from view by the mass of rounded yellow-eyed little 
faces of a blue so pure and clear and placidly celestial that the richest 
Forget-me-not by their side takes on a shrill and vulgar note. The 
blue of Eritrichium is absolute ; lacking the tinny violence of Gentiana 
verna’s sapphire satin, and the almost vicious intensity of Scilla bifolia, 
it has a quality of bland and assured perfection impossible to describe 
asto imagine. And still more impossible to believe by those who have 
only seen the comparatively rare and squalid stars of faded turquoise 
which are all that Eritrichium usually condescends to show in cultiva- 
tion—if it ever condescend to reach that pitch of ostentatiousness 
at all. Eritrichium is the typical high-alpine, only to be seen with 
climbing and effort ; it is the motto of the mountaineer, and the crown 
of achievement for the walker in the Alps, who will have trudged over 
leagues of Flannel-flower before once he catches sight of the King of 
the Alps, set in blobs of sky across the face of some dark cliff, or on some 
sunny slope of the highest ridges making blots of fallen heaven among 
the scanty herbage of the hill. Unlike another Arctic species of high- 
alpine distribution, Ranunculus glacialis, Eritrichium is comparatively 
rare in the central ranges of Switzerland—always a local plant, indeed, 
but almost always of the most generous abundance wherever it occurs. 
Only on the Southern borders of Switzerland will you begin to see its 
full beauty, and after that it grows steadily commoner and commoner 
as you go South and East, until in Tyrol you may almost always count 
on finding it wherever volcanic or granitic rock breaks up through the 
Dolomite. And, whereas in the main chains it is rarely found below 
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