14 



the beautiful surroundings which he foves so well. 

 Speaking on flowers, Ruskin says : " To the child and the 

 girl, the peasant and the manufacturing operative, the 

 grisette and the nun, to the lover and the monk, flowers, 

 they are precious always." Ruskin's intense love of 

 Nature and landscape is such as to arouse his indignation 

 at the so-called pioneers of " modern progress " who, on a 

 pretence of benefiting the community, "deform the beauty 

 of the country, and turn the groves of paradise into so 

 many pandemoniums, where furnaces send flame and 

 smoke into a once pure atmosphere, blighting the flowers 

 and grasses of the fields and lanes, and turning a garden of 

 Nature's own making into a desert, where nothing but 

 ugliness and impurity survives." 



Leaving historical places and resuming our subject, 

 with which our Lake District is so rich, owing in a certain 

 extent to the geological formation, which includes, lime- 

 stone, slate, Silurian, and igneous rock, sandstone, &c. 

 Each class of rock presents a different variety of plants : 

 on the limestone, over the Kendal Fells, we have 

 quantities of the limestone-loving plants polypody, 

 polypodium calcareum, asplenium viride (green stemmed 

 spleenwort), ceterach officinarum (scaly spleenwort), 

 scolopendrium vulgare (hart's tongue), asplenium marinum, 

 lastrea rigida (a rare European species extremely 

 limited in its geographical distribution, both on the 

 Continent and in this country, confined here to three 

 counties bordering on each other, South Westmorland, 

 North Lancashire, and the West Riding of Yorkshire), 

 adiantum capillus veneris (the true maidenhair), recently 

 found on the limestone rocks of South Westmorland, by 

 Mr. W. H. Stansfield, an entirely new habitat for this the 

 most interesting of our British plants, specimens of which, 

 after being submitted for identification to Professor Baker, 



