GENERAL 259 



shrubs. In eastern Europe, outside the lush meadows 

 of the rich alluvial valleys and the subalpine and alpine 

 regions, the grass tracts are, as a rule, of the dry and 

 spare type of the steppe with narrow, hard, and wiry 

 leaves. To the climate of western Europe are due the 

 extensive evergreen carpets of succulent grass with thin, 

 broad leaves, which reach their characteristic develop- 

 ment in the British Isles. At a short distance from the 

 Atlantic shore of the continent the grass begins to turn 

 yellow-grey and to wither in winter and in the height 

 of summer. The meadows, common to eastern and 

 western Europe, are determined, as a rule, by the abun- 

 dance of water in the rich soil. Thus the geographical 

 significance of the two types of grass carpets in the 

 west and in the east is entirely different The dissimi- 

 larity of appearance, requirements, and habits connotes 

 a fundamental divergence of physical environment. Also 

 indicative of uniformly cool and rainy climates, and to 

 be found extensively in western Europe as well as in the 

 north, are the high moors or peat-bogs which occur on 

 badly drained soils and in impure waters, and disappear 

 gradually eastward. The heather moors, characteristic 

 of poor soils, are again plentiful in the west and in 

 northern Germany, but fail in the east. 



In Europe the relations between vegetation and its 

 physical environment are obscured, as in China or India, 

 by the removal of the primitive plant-covering and the 

 alterations undergone by the soil, and even the climate, in 

 the course of centuries. The well-kept woodlands of 

 these countries bear but a distant relation to the 

 primeval wildernesses of forest, undrained, strewn with 

 mires and swamps, packed with a thick undergrowth, 

 encumbered with dead trunks and stumps, littered with 

 decaying branches, and padded with mosses and ferns 



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