Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/613

Rh great ridge, that all the passengers were filling their hands with big nosegays to carry away as mementoes of the mountains. The sandwort in particular starred all the crannies among the rifted rocks with its delicate blossoms, and brightened up the otherwise bare and forbidding soil with the mingled green and white of its densely tufted bunches. Arenaria Grœnlandica is its scientific name—a name that tells at once the better part of its curious history; for this little plant belongs by rights to the frozen shores of far northern Greenland, and the little colony that lingers on here in the clefts of the rock has lived on the chilly summits of the "White Mountains ever since the close of the Glacial Epoch.

There are many other flowers on the slopes of Mount Washington far more full of interest to the American botanist than this Greenland sandwort, because far more isolated in the New World, and far more difficult for him to find elsewhere. The sandwort occurs abundantly on several other mountain-summits in the States, being found on the Shawangunks, the Catskills, and the Adirondacks, as well as in the Green Mountains and on the higher peaks round Lake Memphremagog. At Bath, Maine, it even appears on river-banks near the sea, and farther northward, in Labrador and Greenland, it becomes a common plant of the plains and uplands. But the Alpine brook saxifrage (Saxifrage rivularis) confines itself in the States entirely to Mount Washington, as its beautiful congener, the purple saxifrage (S. oppositifolia), does to the rocky crags of Willoughby Mountain in Northern Vermont. So, too, the little creeping mountain potentilla of the Scotch Highlands (Sibbaldia procumbens) is only found in the United States on the Presidential Range of the White Mountains. There are many of these Alpine or sub-Alpine plants which the American botanist can pick here, and here only, unless he chooses to wend his way to the frozen shores of the far North in chilly Labrador and the Hudson Bay Territory. Yet, to the English naturalist, they are comparatively uninteresting, for they form part of the common European mountain flora, which reappears on all the higher peaks of his own continent, from the Alps and the Caucasus to the Norwegian fields and the Scotch Highlands. To him, then, these two native American upland plants present far more numerous points of interest, because this is the only place in the civilized world where he can hope to find them ready to his hand, as representatives of the truly northern New-World flora.

The general aspect of vegetation on the higher levels of the White Mountains, indeed, is distinctly subarctic, or, to give its truer name, as I prefer to say, glacial. Besides the common sun-dews and the grass of Parnassus, which always follow the upland bogs of northern climates on both sides the Atlantic, Mount Washington and his neighbors possess a large number of chilly plants, like the Norwegian cloud-berry (Rubus chamœmorus), the Alpine willow-herb (Epilobium Alpinum), the dwarf rattlesnake-root (Nabalus nanus), the mountain