222 LAMARCKIAN HYPOTHESIS OF THE 



and the west of Ireland in wliich there occurs a small plant 

 of the cord-rush family (Eriocaulon septangulare), which, 

 though common in America, is nowhere to be found on the 

 European Continent. It is the only British plant which be- 

 longs to no other part of Europe. How was it transported 

 across the Atlantic 1 Entangled, mayhap, in the form of a 

 single seed, — for its seeds are exceedingly light and small, 

 --in the plumage of some water-fowl, free of both sea and 

 lake, it had been carried in the germ from the weed-stirted 

 edge of some American swamp or mere, to some mossy 

 lochan of Connaught or of Skye ; and one such seed trans- 

 ported by one such accident, unique in its occurrence in 

 thousands of years, would be quite sufficient to puzzle all the 

 botanists for ever after. I have seen the seed of one of our 

 Scotch grasses, that had been originally caught in the matted 

 fleece of a sheep reared among the hills of Sutherland, and 

 then wrought into a coarse, ill-dressed woollen cloth, carried 

 about for months in a piece of underclothing. It might have 

 gone over half the globe in that time, and, when cast away 

 witb the worn vestment, might have originated a new circle 

 for its species in South America or New Holland. There 

 are seeds specially contrived by the Great Designer to be car- 

 ried far from their original habitats in the coats of animals, 

 — a mode which admits of transport to much greater distances 

 than the mode, also extensively operative, of consigning them 

 for conveyance to their stomachs ; and when we see the work 

 in its effects, we are puzzled by the want of a record of an 

 emigratory process, of which, in the circumstances, no record 

 could possibly exist Unable to make out a case for the 

 "shaking of the bag," we bethink us, in the emergency, of 

 repetition of creation. But in circles separated by time, not 

 space, — by time, across whose dim gulfs no voyager sails and 

 no bird flies, and over wliich there are no means of transport 

 from the point where a race once fails, to any other point in 



