SOME AMERICAN COLONISTS. 215 



upon some shelving Irish coast by westerly winds. Sim- 

 ilarly, in a few Connemara pools, as well as in two or 

 three Continental stations, another pretty little American 

 water-plant, classically named the naiad, has long grown 

 in isolated colonies, cut off by the Atlantic from the 

 main body of its race in Massachusetts and Labrador. A 

 beautiful small white orchid, too, distantly allied to our 

 common English lady's-tresses, abounds all over the east- 

 ern half of North America ; but in Europe, it is known 

 only in a few bogs in County Cork, where the ardor of 

 modern botanists is rapidly putting an end to its brief 

 European career. This case presents some features of 

 peculiar interest, because the Irish specimens seem to 

 have been settled in the country for a very long period, 

 sufficient to have set up an incipient tendency toward the 

 evolution of a new species ; for they had so far varied 

 before their first discovery by botanists that Lindley con- 

 sidered them to be distinct from their American allies ; 

 and even Dr. Bentham originally so classed them, though 

 ho now admits the essential identity of both kinds. The 

 blue Bermuda grass-lily, a'gain, a common and extremely 

 graceful American meadow- weed, is found in one place 

 only in Europe ; and that is near Woodford, in Galway, 

 where it does not appear to have been introduced by 

 human agency. 



It would even have been possible before the days of 

 Columbus for a philosophical botanist of the modern 

 type (had one then been imaginable) to have predicted 

 the existence of the American continent from the occur- 

 rence of so many strange plants in isolated situations on 

 the western shores of Britain and Scandinavia, lie would 

 rightly have argued that these unfamiliar weeds, not 

 belonging to any part of the European flora, and some- 

 times even differing wholly from any known family of 



