T H.E ELM. 



WHETHER the elm be'truly an ancient Briton, or> tree originally from 

 South-eastern Europe, is an open question. Like the chesnut and 

 several others, it has been a resident in our island from time im- 

 memorial ; there is reason to believe, nevertheless, that it is not one of 

 those trees which, with the oak and the pine, can assert their claim to 

 be absolutely indigenous, that is to say, growing upon British soil as 

 one of the original gifts of nature, instead of owing its importation to 

 the hand of man. The subject to which this question forms an opening 

 is one of the most curious and interesting that botanists and physical 

 geographers have to consider. It involves not only the natural laws 

 and the accidental processes by which plants have been diffused over 

 the face of the earth, but the problem of the primitive seats of particular 

 species. Looking at the ancient forests and the immortal meadows, at 

 the lilies that brighten the quiet pools and river-inlets, far away in the 

 most secret solitudes of the country; or at the saxifrages that sprinkle 

 the mountain -slopes with their beautiful stars of gold or delicately- 

 speckled white, we think most naturally fe that these things, or at all 

 events that the plants which were their ancestors and progenitors, have 

 occupied these self-same.spots ever since the beginning.. And doubtless 

 this is true of very many of the forms of life that surround us. But 

 very many others have as certainly been derived from localities more or 

 less distant. Migration has been no less steady on the part of plants, 

 sometimes as the result of natural causes, sometimes under the influence 

 of man, and this, upon his part, either knowingly or unconsciously, 

 migration, we say, has been no less steady on the part of plants, than 

 emigration has been with our own species. The colonizing of new lands 

 in ancient times and in modern ones, has in every age had its silent 

 but energetic parallel among plants. Such migration is still in progress, 

 and perhaps more vigorously than ever before ; it would seem that 

 whatever man does, the unconscious portion of living nature does 

 likewise that whichever of the two takes the initiative, the other 

 cannot choose but follow suit. 



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