SOME ALPINE CLIMBERS. 209 



slowly die away from generation to generation. The 

 mountain known as the Sow of Atholl, in Perthshire, 

 has thus succeeded in preserving one of its ancient 

 glacial inhabitants, a blue heath known as Menziesia, 

 now rapidly verging to extinction. The Alpine astraga- 

 lus lingers on in the Clova and Braemar range ; its ally 

 the field oxytrope is also confined in Britain to a single 

 spot among the Clova hills. The saxifrages are a very 

 glacial group, and three or four of them are now dis- 

 tinctly becoming more and more rare in individuals. 

 One species at present lingers with us only on the sum- 

 mit of Ben Lawers ; another occurs on the same moun- 

 tain, as well as on Ben Nevis and Lochnagar ; a third is 

 confined to Ben Nevis and Ben Avers ; a fourth has 

 several Scotch and English colonies, but grows nowhere 

 in Ireland except on the mossy sides of Ben Bulben. 

 So, too, the Alpine sowthistle is confined in these islands 

 to Clova and Lochnagar, while the mountain Lloydia is 

 only known on three isolated summits in the Snowdon 

 range. 



Almost all these plants are, in all probability, now 

 actually in course of extinction over the whole world ; 

 certainly they have long been growing scarcer and scarcer 

 in the British Isles. For example, the beautiful lady's- 

 slipper, by far the most striking of all northern orchids, 

 was once found in several parts of tliis country ; but it 

 now lingers only near Settle, in Yorkshire, and on a 

 single estate in Durham, where it is as carefully pre- 

 served by the owner as if it were pheasants or fallow 

 deer. The same thing is true of many other rare British 

 plants, and others, which once occupied a few scattered 

 mountain-tops, have already altogether disappeared. 

 Their retrogression can hardly be set down to the spread 

 of cultivation, for man has done little or nothing as yet 



