The Romance of a Wayside Weed. 5 5 



grows wild in Portugal, western Spain/and the higher 

 Pyrenees, and reappears in south-western Ireland. 

 Another pretty little saxifrage jumps in like manner 

 from the Asturias to Killarney. : St. Dabeoc's heath 

 has the same range. The spiked orchid takes a great 

 bound from Bordeaux to a sihgle station in County 

 Galway. To sum it up shortly^ ' Crete, Auvergne, 

 the Pyrenees, S.-W. Ireland,' is a common technical 

 description of the distribution of many beautiful south 

 European plants. 



Fig. 15. — Flower and fruit of Arbutus. 



Now, these peculiarities of distribution lead me up 

 pretty surely to the romance of the hairy wood-spurge. 

 They show that it did not get here by accident. Like 

 the elephant-headed god of the Mexicans, iijie the 

 debased traces of Buddhism in the Aztec religion, they 

 raise an immediate curiosity as to their origin,;n,:Wh,at 

 we may call the natural range of British plants is of 

 this sort: they have entered the country from the 

 Continent, vid Kent, Sussex, East Anglia, or Scotland ; 

 and they fall for the most part under three great 

 divisions. The first division consists pf central Euro- 



