1 86 Flowers and their Pedigrees. 



sure that high Arctic or Alpine plants, adapted to a 

 chilly climate, like the saxifrages, the sibbaldia, the 

 crowberry, and the Swiss veronica, spread over all 

 the plains and valleys of Great Britain and the neigh- 

 bouring continent. 



In those days, we saw good reason to believe when 

 we w^ere examining the stranded southern flora of 

 Cornwall and Devonshire, England and Ireland were 

 united to one another as well as to France and Hol- 

 land by a broad belt of lowland occupying what is 

 now the bed of the two channels and the German 

 Ocean, so that the mammoth and the cave-bear could 

 roam uninterruptedly from the Yorkshire hiljs to the 

 rock-shelters of the Dordogne, and from the bogs of 

 Connaught to the then ice-clad summits of the Hartz 

 and the Jura. The dark hunters of the period, who 

 framed the rough, chipped stone hatchets of the 

 Abbeville drift and the beautiful flint arrowheads of 

 the southern French caves, could in like manner range 

 without let or hindrance from Kent's Hole at Torquay 

 to the Schwatka cavern in Moravia, and from the 

 honeycombed cliffs of Yorkshire valleys to the lime- 

 stone grottoes among the Alpine slopes. That distri- 

 bution of land and water easily accounts for the dis- 

 persion of Arctic and snow-line plants or animals 

 over all the snowy regions of northern Europe. 



