Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/616

594 Mount Washington, indeed, though the highest of all your North-eastern peaks, is not by any means the best station in the States for the plants of this old stranded glacier stratum. As you go from New York to Montreal by the Memphremagog route, you pass near St. Johnsbury a little station named West Burke, whence stages carry you in a few miles to Willoughby Lake, one of the loveliest among all the lovely sheets of water with which Northern Vermont is so copiously dotted. The hills surrounding Willoughby Lake are rich in mementoes of the Glacial Epoch. There, alone in the States, thanks to combined latitude and elevation, the American botanist can pick at leisure the beautiful tufted mountain saxifrage that purples with its bloom the Highlands of Scotland in early spring. There, too, grows its pretty yellow congener (Saxifrage aizoides), a circumpolar species of both hemispheres, which descends in Europe as far south as the Cambrian lakes. The Alpine rock-cress, the hoary whitlow-grass, the purple astragalus, and many other high northern species, are also almost confined in the States to Willoughby Mountain, though reappearing far to the north in British territory—either Canada or Newfoundland. Mount Katahdin, in Maine, ranks next as a refuge for many good glacial species, including the beautiful little starry saxifrage (Saxifrage stellaris), whose slender blossoms spread in countless numbers beside the rills and streams of the Scotch Highlands.

Naturally, however, to a European visitor, such a plant as the Greenland sandwort possesses a far deeper interest and importance than these old friends of the Swiss or Scotch uplands. It is a native American, local to the soil; or, to speak more correctly, a rare example of a glacial plant which has died out in distant Europe in spite of the superior advantages there afforded to Alpine or sub-arctic species, while it has lingered on in vigorous colonies over all the fitting districts of America, from the riks of Greenland to the Catskills of New York. Nay, more, in a slightly altered and adapted form, as the Arenaria glabra of the systematic botanists, it has held its own even as far south as the mountain-tops of Carolina—a glacial strayling stranded almost alone on the chilliest summits of a sub-tropical land. The Carolina type, as might naturally be expected, is a larger, handsomer, and more luxuriant plant than the New Hampshire and Greenland variety, but it does not differ in any point of real structural or systematic importance from its pretty little sisters of more frozen climes.

Very much the same thing is true of our other common Mount Washington flower, the yellow avens that grows so abundantly in and out among the thick-set beds of Greenland sandwort. This, too, is a thorough-going native American type, though not a type of glacial antecedents. What gave it its deepest interest in our eyes was the very fact that, growing as it did side by side with those sub-arctic plants, the bog-bilberry and the mountain saxifrage, the Alpine bearberry and the Lapland phlox, it yet exemplified the other main