The Romance of a Wayside Weed. 55 



grows wild in Portugal, western Spain, and the higher 

 Pyrenees, and reappears in south-western Ireland. 

 Another pretty little saxifrage jumps in like manner 

 from the Asturias to Killarney. St. Dabeoc's heath 

 has the same range. The spiked orchid takes a great 

 bound from Bordeaux to a single station in County 

 Gahvay. To sum it up shortly, ' Crete, Auvergne, 

 the Pyrenees, S.-W. Ireland,' is a common technical 

 description of the distribution of many beautiful south 

 European plants. 



Fig. 15. — Flower and fruit of Arbutus. 



Now, these peculiarities of distribution lead me up 

 pretty surely to the romance of the hairy wood-spurge. 

 They show that it did not get here by accident. Like 

 the elephant-headed god of the Mexicans, like the 

 debased traces of Buddhism in the Aztec religion, they 

 raise an immediate curiosity as to their origin. What 

 we may call the natural range of British plants is of 

 this sort : they have entered the country from the 

 Continent, via, Kent, Sussex, East Anglia, or Scotland ; 

 and they fall for the most part under three great 

 divisions. The first division consists of central Euro- 



