194 Flowers and their Pedigrees. 



this boss of smooth stone on whose broad back we 

 are sitting, a tiny group of our pretty mountain tulips 

 has continuously occupied age after age this self-same 

 spot. Originally, no doubt, they covered the whole 

 sides of the mountains and stretched down far into 

 the plains and valleys ; but gradually, as the world's 

 weather grew warmer, they were restricted, first, to 

 the mountain tracts of Wales and Scotland, then to a 

 small Snowdonian district, and finally, even within 

 that shrunken realm, to two or three isolated peaks. 

 Occasionally, I suppose, a seed from one of the three 

 existing Welsh colonies may be carried by accident 

 into the territory of the others ; but it is in the highest 

 degree improbable that the stock has ever been rein- 

 forced for the last fifty thousand years from any purely 

 external body of its congeners in the higher Alps or 

 in the Arctic regions. The dark small men of the 

 neolithic age, the Aryan Celts of the bronze period, 

 the conquering Roman from the south, the English- 

 man, the Scandinavian, the Norman, all have since 

 come, and most of them have gone again ; but the 

 Lloydias still hold precarious possession of their soli- 

 tary remaining strongholds. An analogy from the 

 animal world will help to bring out the full strange- 

 ness of this extraordinary isolation. Mount Washing- 

 ton in New Hampshire is the highest peak among 



