124 BRITISH AND FOREIGN 



invasion. Even the still earlier brown Euskarians and 

 yellow Mongolians, who held the land before the advent of 

 the ancient Britons, were themselves immigrants ; the very 

 Autochthones in person turn out, on close inspection, to 

 be vagabonds and wanderers and foreign colonists. In 

 short, man as a whole is not an indigenous animal at all 

 in the British Isles. Be he who he may, when we push 

 his pedigree back to its prime original, we find him always 

 arriving in the end by the Dover steamer or the Harwich 

 packet. Five years, in fact, are quite sufficient to give him 

 a legal title to letters of naturalisation, unless indeed he be 

 a German grand-duke, in which case he can always become 

 an Englishman offhand by Act of Parliament. 



It is just the same with all the other animals and plants 

 that now inhabit these isles of Britain. If there be any- 

 thing at all with a claim to be considered really indigenous, 

 it is the Scotch ptarmigan and the Alpine hare, the northern 

 holygrass and the mountain flowers of the Highland sum- 

 mits. All the rest are sojourners and wayfarers, brought 

 across as casuals, like the gipsies and the Oriental plane, 

 at various times to the United Kingdom, some of them 

 recently, some of them long ago, but not one of them (it 

 seems), except the oyster, a true native. The common 

 brown rat, for instance, as everybody knows, came over, 

 not, it is true, with "William the Conqueror, but with the 

 Hanoverian dynasty and King George I. of blessed memory. 

 The familiar cockroach, or ' black beetle,' of our lower 

 regions, is an Oriental importation of the last century. 

 The hum of the mosquito is now just beginning to be heard 

 in the land, especially in some big London hotels. The 

 Colorado beetle is hourly expected by Cunard steamer. 

 The Canadian roadside erigeron is well established already 

 in the remoter suburbs ; the phylloxera battens on our 

 hothouse vines ; the American river- weed stops the naviga- 



