The Romance of a Wayside Weed. 75 



tected eastern shore of Britain generally, the low 

 slopes have survived well enough, and patches of 

 shingle and sand, like the Dogger Bank, still mark 

 the position of the higher sunken lands ; but on the 

 west and north the open Atlantic has eaten away all 

 but the most sheltered plains, and cut its way at all 

 exposed points into the heart of the hills, giving rise 

 to the magnificent cliff scenery of Cornwall, Kerry, 

 and the western Highlands. If you stand upon the 

 shore of Coboe Bay in Guernsey, and look at low tide 

 across the vast floor of jagged and water-fretted 

 granite rocks which line its bottom, you will see with 

 what force the waves have wormed their way over all 

 the lowland ; and they will only halt when they have 

 planed down the whole of the island, as they have 

 already planed down the lesser land which once 

 stretched out to northward beyond the solitary pinna- 

 cles of the Casquets. 



When all these changes had taken place, the stray 

 members of the southern flora in Cornwall, Devon, 

 Kerry, and Connemara would find themselves quite 

 cut off from their fellows in the Mediterranean, the 

 Pyrenees, and the Asturias. For the water has eaten 

 away almost all the plain of the Bay of Biscay, save 

 only a comparatively insignificant angle between the 

 Loire, the mountains of Auvergne, and the roots of the 



