STATE HOKTJCULTURAL SOCIETY. 267 



while the earth got over this chill, and the great sheet of ice started 

 to recede to its home in the north; and along with it went all the 

 Arctic life, plants and animals; willows and walrus; moss and musk 

 oxen. But the northward direction was not the only line of retreat 

 left open to these refugees of the cold. They could also ascend the 

 mountains and find the climate which they loved if they were only 

 high enough, and this they did, even within the tropical region, and 

 when the Alpine climbers ascend the snow-clad mountains of pictur- 

 esque Switzerland and gather a pretty little bouquet of a dozen different 

 nival flowers, on that barren zoue, just before the perpetual snow and 

 ice is reached, half of them will be of the same variety that some polar 

 explorer has gathered that season, in the land of the midnight sun, to 

 store away in hib herbarium for future reference. One of the most 

 prominent botanists who has studied this peculiar nival and polar 

 flora was Professor Oswald Heor. In making a study of the nival 

 flora of Switzerland he found 337 species of flowering plants at Alpine 

 height, that is beween 8,000 and 13,000 feet above the sea. Only one- 

 tenth of these comprised species belonging to the lowlands of the sur- 

 rounding country, while about one-half of these plants originated in 

 the Arctic but had come from Scandinavia with the ice of the glacial 

 period, and had been left stranded on the Alps, when the ice receded, as 

 a floating object is left by the ebbing tide. And this word *'ebbing" is 

 not a bad one to use, for there are scientists who believe that centu- 

 ries from now this great sheet of ice will come again, and again recede 

 ebbing and flowing in the life of the world as the ocean's tides do in 

 ours. Therefore only two-fifths of the flowering plants of the Alps 

 are strictly natives of the region they occupy. With a few wolfish 

 dogs tied to a sled and a reindeer or two in the distance, an Alpine 

 climber could easily imagine he was in the "great white zone." I 

 feel like moving that a vote of thanks be given to the learned men al- 

 luded to above, that they have placed the next advent of the glacial 

 period so far in the future that this horticultural Society, and all its 

 immediate descendants will not be seriously incommoded by it 



An English bontanist states that the tropics have from 40,000 to 

 50,000 species of plants, the north temperate zone about 20,000 spe- 

 cies, and the Arctic 1,000 or less, with some 2,000 among the Alpine 

 flora, or about 3,000 species enjoying (?) an Arctic climate. Small as 

 this number is, it is sufficient to do away with the popular opinion 

 that the polar regions and snow-clad mountains are practically de- 

 void of vegetation. A fact that may surprise some is that while in 

 the Arctic there are 762 kinds of flowers, a flowering plant has never 



