36 COUNTRY ESSAYS. 



fitness to the localities it chooses better than Mr. Ruskin, and 

 certainly no one ever drew it with exacter delineation of every 

 curve and grace. When roaming over a Highland corrie, how- 

 ever, or marking the sunlight fall on the granite blocks of 

 Dartmoor, all but swallowed, as they are in summer, by the 

 purple ocean of heather that surges in upon their desolation, 

 the traveller is apt to forget that there are more than one 

 species of heather in the kingdom. There are seven (or, 

 omitting Calluna, six) even in England, while the whole family 

 boasts some 400 species, to say nothing of the innumerable 

 hybrids and varieties which our gardens produce. Every one 

 'knows the common ling or heather (Calluna), which is the 

 most widely distributed of the family, ranging as it does, from 

 Labrador to the Azores, and spreading all along the western 

 coast of Europe from the Atlantic-washed side of Africa, which 

 is the original home of the race. The Scotch heather proper 

 (Erica cinerea) is somewhat thicker and taller than this last, 

 with reddish-purple flowers which delight bees, while its tender 

 shoots are dear to the grouse and blackcock. The crossleaved 

 heath (E. tetralioc) once seen is never forgotten. Fairies might 

 have modelled it in wax, as, rising four or five inches from the 

 ground, it hangs its delicately-tinted, rose-flushed flowers over 

 some boggy spot where the cotton-grass flutters in the wind 

 and the plover whistles against the bleeting snipe, hence known 

 in Scotland as the " heather-bleat." Whoever has penetrated 

 to the angry coast of the Lizzard, either to see its curious 

 churches or to gather its characteristic plants, must have recog- 

 nized the Cornish heath (E. vagans) as soon as he set foot 

 upon the magnesian limestone, while the ciliated heath occurs 

 in isolated spots in the Cornish peninsula, and Mackay's and 

 the Mediterranean heath are only to be found in the south- 

 western districts of Ireland, being in truth outliers from the 

 flora of the Spanish peninsula on the Continent. All these 

 heaths are fond of lonely, wind-smitten localities, tenderly 



