ENGLISH WOODS : A CONTRAST. 41 



lowest and humblest forms of vegetable growth, but 

 think how much it adds to the beauty of all our wild 

 scenery, giving to our mountain walls and drift bowl- 

 ders the softest and most pleasing tints. The rocky 

 escarpments of New York and New England hills 

 are frescoed by Time himself, painted as with the 

 brush of the eternal elements. But the lichen is 

 much less conspicuous in England, and plays no such 

 part in her natural scenery. The climate is too 

 damp. The rocks in Wales and Northumberland 

 and in Scotland are dark and cold and unattractive. 

 The trees in the woods do not wear the mottled suit 

 of soft gray ours do. The bark of the British beech 

 is smooth and close-fitting, and often tinged with a 

 green mould. The Scotch pine is clad as in a ragged 

 suit of leather. Nature uses mosses instead of lich- 

 ens. The old walls and house-tops are covered with 

 moss a higher form of vegetation than lichens. 

 Its decay soon accumulates a little soil or vegetable 

 mould, which presently supports flowering plants. 



Neither are there any rocks in England worth 

 mentioning ; no granite bowlders, no fern-decked or 

 moss-covered fragments scattered through the woods, 

 as with us. They have all been used up for building 

 purposes, or for road-making, or else have quite dis- 

 solved in the humid climate. I saw rocks in Wales, 

 quite a profusion of them in the pass of Llanberis, 

 but they were tame indeed in comparison with such 

 rock scenery as that say at Lake Mohunk, in the 

 Shawangunk range in New York. There are passes 



