xu INTRODUCTION. 



and elevated regions these fail "from the earth, we get the 

 choice jewellery of vegetable-life known as alpine plants. 



^pine plants have one great charm — that of endless 

 variety. They include subjects from many widely^ separate 

 divisions of the vegetable kingdom, and endless diversities 

 of form and colour. Among them are little orchids, as 

 interesting as their tropical brethren, though so much 

 smaller ; Lilliputian trees, and even a tree-like moss {Lyco- 

 podium dendroideum), that branches and grows mto an 

 erect little pjrramid, as if in imitation of the mountain- 

 loving Pines,' which, in their massy strength, are often 

 tortured into quaintness by storms, but rarely submit to 

 become miniatures of what they are in lower regioiis ; ferns 

 that peep from narrowest crevices of high rocky places, 

 often so small and minute that they seem to cling to the 

 rocks for shelter, not throwing forth their forms with airy 

 grace as they do in more favourable scenes ; numerous 

 bulbous flowers, from Lilies to Bluebells, which appear to 

 have been refined in Nature's laboratory, all coarseness and 

 ruggedness eliminated, all preciousness and beauty retained ; 

 evergreen shrubs, perfect in leaf and blossom and fruit as 

 any that grow in our shrubberies, yet so small that an 

 inverted finger-glass would make a roomy conservatory for 

 them ; creeping plants, like their mountain-brethren, rarely 

 venturing above mother earth, yet trailing and spreading 

 freely along it, and, when they crawl over the brows of rocks 

 or stones, draping them with curtains of colour as lovely as 

 any afforded by the most vigorous climbers of tropical 

 forests ; " foliage plants," small, it is true, yet far more 

 interesting than the huger ones which we grow under this 

 name ; numberless minute plants that scarcely exceed the 

 mosses in size, and quite surpass them in the way in which 



