ERITRICHIUM TERGLOVIENSE. 
Of verified records I can give (and give without scruple, seeing that 
the heights are so daunting, the distances so remote, and the abundance 
of Eritrichium when found so inexhaustible)—Piz Ot, Piz Languard, 
the rocks at the base of the Piz Rosegg (and general throughout the 
high granites of the Engadine); in Switzerland it is rare and local, 
chiefly confined to the Southern border, in the heights of the Valais, 
Angstbord Pass; Graian Alps—Col de Clapier, Malamott; Maritime 
Alps—Col de l’Arpetto (not apparently in quantities so great as usual) ; 
Dolomites—very abundant on all the high volcanic outcrops round the 
Marmolata, and more sparingly on the granites of the Rolle Pass; 
Bergamask Alps—quite sporadically on the Cima Torsoleto (the adverbs 
referring only to what my own eyes may have noted; possibly a 
quarter of a mile further along the same ridge the plant might cease 
altogether, or become profuse). Let no one blame me for not grudging 
to anyone capable of getting there, the sight of the most marvellous 
beauty that the Alps have to offer; it were better that all the ranges 
should become destitute of flowers (that at present, after all, unvisited 
by man, have to sit content in the admiration of marmots), than that 
one earnest seeker after a joy so pure should go hungry. Indeed, the 
cant on such matters is a little sickening ; of what value to the world 
is a beauty’s existence, if the world be not allowed to see it 2 And what 
is the point, and where the sanity or sentiment, in leaving the last 
three bulbs of a Tulip to moulder on some Macedonian mountain, 
where no one will ever have any satisfaction in their existence, rather 
than in bringing them home to rejoice everybody, including them- 
selves, with a new lease of their life ? This tiresome nonsense, indeed, 
is largely talked by those who never have seen such joys, and have a 
sentimental notion that some mysterious sacrosanctity attaches to 
the fact that no one else is ever to see them either. Humanity’s in- 
grained snobbishness has an incurable passion for the arcane. Nor 
in any case need we fear that anyone will ever succeed in devas- 
tating the remote, high and difficult places where alone the King of 
the Alps holds his court. Even at the most hardened collector His 
Majesty laughs out with undaunted blue eye from his unassailable 
fastnesses, secure in his impregnability no less than in his astound- 
ing abundance. There is enough Eritrichium in one range of the 
Southern Alps for all the men and all the marmots ever made—and 
with plenty more left over for the gods to delight in for ever. 
But the King of the Alps, when all is said and done, should be 
adored, not touched. He is so impossible of cultivation that to 
take him from his native crevices seems murder as clear as to bruise 
a butterfly in our hands—an act more certain to put the blue 
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