Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/618

596 beautiful while it lasts, with their profuse bloom, a hundred times more vivid and pervasive than anything to be seen in those much overpraised and misrepresented tropics. Even in temperate Europe and America, everybody must have noticed that, as we go up the higher hills, we find their slopes purpled with heather or golden with gorse, pink with mountain-laurel, or crimson with masses of the wild rhododendron.

Why is this? Simply because among the uplands and more especially close to the snow-line, bees are rare, and the work of fertilization is mainly left to the care of butterflies. Now, the bee, as everybody knows, is a steady, regular, business-like worker: he flies low, hunts close, never mixes his liquors, sticks steadily to one kind of honey produced by one species on each journey, and looks carefully for his selected blossom in and out among the tangled vegetation of meadow or road-side. Hence the flowers that specially cater for his peculiar tastes are more remarkable for their exact adaptation to his size and shape than for any conspicuous floral display. But the butterfly, on the other hand, is well known to be a fickle, flitting, fantastic creature: he flies high from bunch to bunch of large and noticeable bright-hued flowers. Above all other members of the insect tribe, he is a lover of color: big patches of red or white or purple are the things to attract him from a distance with their massive glare, and to draw him down from his careless flight in the eye of heaven. Hence butterfly flowers generally grow in huge trusses, massed closely together to re-enforce one another's effect; and they produce the finest total displays of any species known to humanity. On the hill-tops, and especially close above the limit of trees, the high-flying butterflies have things all their own way. The plants that affect these chilly situations, therefore, have before been compelled to accommodate themselves to the circumstances, and to trust for fertilization to the stray attentions of the casual butterfly. It is not without reason, then, that on the summit of Mount Washington a specialized and peculiar glacial butterfly should still accompany the specialized and peculiar glacial flowers.

Our Greenland sandwort, indeed, may be taken as a very good representative of the qualities necessary for ultimate success in a high-mountain plant. It grows low, in densely tufted masses, unlike the majority of its family, the Alsinœ; and thus it escapes both the rapid winds that career so madly round the summits of the Presidential Range, and the frosts of winter from which the snow efficiently protects its humble branches. Its blossoms rise in immense numbers from every tuft, so as to whiten the ground wherever it grows; and the petals are immense for the size of the plant, to act as an advertisement to the passing butterfly. Turn from it for a moment to the beautiful moss-campion (Silene acaulis) which grows close by among the crannies of the Mount Washington rocks, and you get a precisely