126 BRITISH AND FOREIGN 



Slowly, however, times altered, as they are much given 

 to doing ; and a new era dawned upon Britain. The ther- 

 mometer rose rapidly, or at least it would have risen, with 

 effusion, if it had yet been invented. The land emerged 

 from the sea, and southern plants and animals began to 

 invade the area that was afterwards to be England, across 

 the broad belt which then connected us with the Continental 

 system. But in those days communications were slow and 

 land transit difficult. You had to foot it. The Euro- 

 pean fauna and flora moved but gradually and tentatively 

 north-westward, and before any large part of it could settle in 

 England our island was finally cut off from the mainland 

 by the long and gradual wearing away of the cliffs at Dover 

 and Calais. That accounts for the comparative poverty of 

 animal and vegetable life in England, and still more for its 

 extreme paucity and meagreness in Ireland and the High- 

 lands. It has been erroneously asserted, for example, that 

 St. Patrick expelled snakes and lizards, frogs and toads, from 

 the soil of Erin. This detail, as the French newspapers 

 politely phrase it, is inexact. St. Patrick did not expel the 

 reptiles, because there were never any reptiles in Ireland 

 (except dynamiters) for him to expel. The creatures never 

 got so far on their long and toilsome north-westward march 

 before St. George's Channel intervened to prevent their 

 passage across to Dublin. It is really, therefore, to St. 

 George, rather than to St. Patrick, that the absence of 

 toads and snakes from the soil of Ireland is ultimately due. 

 The doubtful Cappadocian prelate is well known to have 

 been always death on dragons and serpents. 



As long ago as the sixteenth century, indeed, Verstegan 

 the antiquary clearly saw that the existence of badgers and 

 foxes in England implied the former presence of a belt of 

 land joining the British Islands to the Continent of Europe ; 

 for, as he acutely observed, nobody (before fox-hunting, at 



