134 BEITISH AND FOREIGN 



and chilliest mountain-tops, where it has gradually been 

 driven, like tourists in August, by the increasing warmth 

 and sultriness of the southern lowlands. The summits of 

 the principal Scotch hills are occupied by many Arctic 

 plants, now slowly dying out, but lingering yet as last 

 relics of that old native British flora. The Alpine milk 

 vetch thus loiters among the rocks of Braemar and Clova ; 

 the Arctic brook- saxifrage flowers but sparingly near the 

 summit of Ben Lawers, Ben Nevis, and Lochnagar ; its 

 still more northern ally, the drooping saxifrage, is now ex- 

 tinct in all Britain, save on a single snowy Scotch height, 

 where it now rarely blossoms, and will soon become 

 altogether obsolete. There are other northern plants of 

 this first and oldest British type, like the Ural oxytrope, 

 the cloudberry, and the white dryas, which remain as yet 

 even in the moors of Yorkshire, or over considerable tracts 

 in the Scotch Highlands ; there are others restricted to a 

 single spot among the Welsh hills, an isolated skerry 

 among the outer Hebrides, or a solitary summit in the 

 Lake District. But wherever they linger, these true-born 

 Britons of the old rock are now but strangers and outcasts 

 in the land ; the intrusive foreigner has driven them to die 

 on the cold mountain-tops, as the Celt drove the Mongolian 

 to the hills, and the Saxon, in turn, has driven the Celt to 

 the Highlands and the islands. Yet as late as the twelfth 

 century itself, even the true reindeer, the Arctic monarch 

 of the Glacial Epoch, was still hunted by Norwegian jarls 

 of Orkney on the mainland of Caithness and Sutherland- 

 shire. 



Second in age is the warm western and south-western 

 type, the type represented by the Portuguese slug, the 

 arbutus trees and Mediterranean heaths of the Killarney 

 district, the flora of Cornwall and the Scilly Isles, and the 

 peculiar wild flowers of South Wales, Devonshire, and the 



