166 ON BIO-GEOLOGY. [vii, 



awe, on the Alpine plants of Wales, Scotland, and the 

 Lake mountains, as organisms, stunted it may be, and 

 even degraded by their long battle with the elements,, 

 but venerable from their age, historic from their en- 

 durance. Relics of an older temperate world, they 

 have lived through thousands of centuries of frost and 

 fog, to sun themselves in a temperate climate once 

 more. I can never pick one of them without a tinge 

 of shame; and to exterminate one of them is to 

 destroy, for the mere pleasure of collecting, the last of 

 a family which God has taken the trouble to preserve 

 for thousands of centuries. 



I trust that these hints for I can call them nothing 

 more will at least awaken any young naturalist who 

 has hitherto only collected natural objects, to study 

 the really important and interesting question How 

 did these things get here ? 



Now hence arise questions which may puzzle the 

 mind of a Hampshire naturalist. You have in this 

 neighbourhood, as you well know, two, or rather three, 

 soils, each carrying its peculiar vegetation. First, you 

 have the clay lying on the chalk, and carrying vast 

 woodlands, seemingly primeval. Next, you have the 

 chalk, with its peculiar, delicate, and often fragrant 

 crop of lime-loving plants ; and next, you have the 

 poor sands and clays of the New Forest basin, satu- 

 rated with iron, and therefore carrying a moorland or 

 peat-loving vegetation, in many respects quite different 

 from the others. And this moorland soil, and this 

 vegetation, with a few singular exceptions, repeats 

 itself, as I daresay you know, in the north of the 

 county, in the Bagshot basin, as it is called the moors 

 of Aldershot, Hartford Bridge, and Windsor Forest. 



