THE FALL OF THE YEAR. 221 



autumnal hawkbit on the open, some strag- 

 gling bushes of the dwarf furze upon the 

 glen-sides, and a mass of rich foxy-brown 

 bracken among the tumbled and uneven 

 rockery of the undercliff. The season is not 

 quite so far advanced here on the south coast 

 as it was a few days since among the dry 

 heather-clad hills and yellow autumn woods 

 of North Wales. Every twenty miles south- 

 ward tells at this season of the year, and so 

 the passion-flowers are even now in blossom 

 down here on the trellis-work of the cottage, 

 with its southerly aspect, while the trees and 

 creepers are fast growing leafless among the 

 windy hills of the north and the midlands. 



It was Buffon, that half-unconscious pre- 

 decessor of our modern evolutionists, who 

 first pointed out the true importance of these 

 zones of climate, from pole to equator, in the 

 history of life upon the earth. For Buffon, 

 with all his contempt for systematic classifica- 

 tion and for accurate scientific knowledge, was 

 a man of that wide philosophic grasp and that 



