HIGH LltE, 95 



northward or upward. For example, I was pleased to 

 note near the summit of Mount Washington (the highest 

 peak in New Hampshire) that a large number of the 

 flo^Ycrs belonged to species well known on the open plains 

 of Lapland and Finland. The plants of the High Alps 

 are found also, as a rule, not only on the High Pyrenees, 

 the Carpathians, the Scotch Grampians, and the 

 Norwegian fjelds, but also round the Arctic Circle in 

 Europe and America. They reappear at long distances 

 where suitable conditions recur : they follow the snow- 

 line as the snow-line recedes ever in summer higher north 

 toward the pole or higher vertically toward the mountain 

 summits. And this bespeaks in one way to the reasoning 

 mind a very ancient ancestry. It shows they date back 

 to a very old and cold epoch. 



Let me give a single instance which strikingly illus- 

 trates the general principle. Near the top of Mount 

 ^Yashington, as aforesaid, lives to this day a little 

 colony of very cold-loving and mountainous butterflies, 

 which never descend below a couple of thousand feet 

 from the wind-swept summit. Except just there, there 

 are no more of there sort anvwhere about : and as far as 

 the butterflies themselves are aware, no others of their 

 species exist on earth : they never have seen a single one 

 of their kind, save of their own little colony. One might 

 compare them with the Pitcairn Islanders in the South 

 Seas — an isolated group of English origin, cut off by a 

 vast distance from all their congeners in Europe or 

 America. But if you go north some eight or nine hun- 

 dred miles from New Hampshire to Labrador, at a 

 certain point the same butterfly reappears, and spreads 



