130 BRITISH AND FOREIGN 



observed with joy in his garden at Reigate the blue Bux- 

 baum speedwell, which is now the acknowledged and hated 

 pest of the Surrey agriculturist. 



The history of some of these waifs and strays which go 

 to make up the wider population of Britain is indeed suffi- 

 ciently remarkable. Like all islands, England has a frag- 

 mentary fauna and flora, whose members have often drifted 

 towards it in the most wonderful and varied manner. 

 Sometimes they bear witness to ancient land connections, 

 as in the case of the spotted Portuguese slug which Pro- 

 fessor Allman found calmly disporting itself on the basking 

 cliffs in the Killarney district. In former days, when Spain 

 and Ireland joined hands in the middle of the Bay of 

 Biscay, the ancestors of this placid Lusitanian mollusk 

 must have ranged (good word to apply to slugs) from the 

 groves of Cintra to the Cove of Cork. But, as time rolled 

 on, the cruel crawling sea rolled on also, and cut away all 

 the western world from the foot of the Asturias to 

 Macgillicuddy's Reeks. So the spotted slug continued to 

 survive in two distinct and divided bodies, a large one in 

 South- vrestern Europe, and a small isolated colony, all 

 alone by itself, around the Kerry mountains and the Lakes 

 of Killarney. At other times pure accident accounts for 

 the presence of a particular species in the mainlands of 

 Britain. For example, the Bermuda grass-lily, a common 

 American plant, is known in a wild state nowhere in Europe 

 save at a place called Woodford, in county Galway. Nobody 

 ever planted it there ; it has simply sprung up from some 

 single seed, carried over, perhaps, on the feet of a bird, or 

 cast ashore by the Gulf Stream on the hospitable coast of 

 Western Ireland. Yet there it has flourished and thriven 

 ever since, a naturalised British subject of undoubted 

 origin, without ever spreading to north or south above a 

 few miles from its adopted habitat. 



