FLOWERS OF THE MEADOWS AND WOODS 19 



billowy ice-field and of the colours of the lake below and 

 of the luminous haze and the deep blue shade in the valley 

 — how is that related to the beauty of the flowers ? Truly 

 enough, it is not a beauty called forth by natural selection. 

 It is primordial ; it is the beauty of great light itself 

 The response to its charm is felt by every living thing, 

 even by the smallest green plant and the invisible animal- 

 cule, as it is by man himself. As I stand on the mountain- 

 side we are all, from animalcule to man, sympathising and 

 uniting, as members of one great race, in our adoration of 

 the sun. And in doing this we men are for the moment 

 close to and in happy fellowship with our beautiful, 

 though speechless, relatives who also live. Even the 

 destructive bacteria which are killed by the sun probably 

 enjoy an exquisite shudder in the process which more 

 than compensates them for their extinction. 



The pleasures of flower-seeking in Switzerland are by 

 no means confined to the great heights. At moderate 

 heights (4000 to 5000 ft.) you have the Alpine meadows, 

 and below those the rich-soiled woods which fill in the 

 sides of the torrent-worn valleys. You cannot see an 

 Alpine meadow after July, as it is cut down by then. It 

 is at its best in June. It bears very little grass, and con- 

 sists almost entirely of flowers. In places the hare-bells 

 and Canterbury bells and the bugloss are so abundant as 

 to make a whole valley-floor blue as in MacWhirter's 

 picture. But more often the blue is intermixed with the 

 balls of red clover and the spikes of a splendid pale pink 

 polygonum (a sort of buckwheat) and of a very large and 

 handsome plantain. Large yellow gentians, mulleins, the 

 nearly black and the purple orchids, vetches of all colours, 

 the Alpine clover with four or five enormous flowers in a 

 head instead of fifty little ones, the Astrantias (like a 

 circular brooch made up of fifty gems each mounted on a 

 long elastic wire and set vibrating side by side), the sky- 



