Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/619

Rh similar assemblage of mountain features. That dainty little plant is tufted like a moss; its leaves are as crowded as those of the sandwort, and similar in shape, for like conditions always produce like results; and its purple blossoms grow in exactly the same wild profusion, making the whole plant, during the flowering season, into one low mat of brilliant bloom. The moss-campion is a perennial, and its close habit and much-branched, creeping stem protect it from the severe winter of New Hampshire, as from the Scotch snows and the frosts of Switzerland. We have in Europe another precisely similar plant, the Alpine lychnis, which one might almost at first sight confuse at a distance with the moss-campion, so absolutely have they accommodated themselves in the same way to the same environment; and this pretty pink flower, with its compactly clustered heads, has survived only on two hill-tops in the British Isles—Little Kilrannoch, a mountain in Forfarshire, and Hobcartin Fell, one of the least visited of our Cambrian heights. Compare the case of the glacial American species which still loiter round Willoughby Lake, or on the frozen heights of Mount Katahdin in Maine.

Every one of these mountain-plants exhibits in perfection the self-same familiar mountain characteristics. Take, for example, the white dryas (Dryas octopetala), a species of interest to American botanists from the fact that in Pursli's time it still grew among the White Mountains, though it has now disappeared entirely from the Ignited States, and can not be discovered south of Lower Canada. (Such local disappearances, by-the-way, are everywhere common, more than one rare local plant having been expunged from the British flora within my own memory.) The dryas is a dwarf and matted perennial herb or undershrub, growing in tufts just like the moss-campion, and with starry white flowers to match the Greenland sandwort. Its short and much-branched stems creep close upon the ground; the prostrate branches are crowded with dense foliage in spreading tufts. The species, in fact, with the rest of its kind, is but a specialized mountain form of avens; and its flowers are white, not yellow, like most of the avens group, in special adaptation to the butterfly taste; for it is a noteworthy fact that many genera which are yellow in the lowlands tend to produce white and purple species when they rise among the mountains or near the Arctic Circle.

The moss-campion is a pink by family, while the dryas is a rose. Now look once more at a member of a totally distinct order, the Lapland phlox, which also grows among the ice-worn bowlders of the Presidential Range. The phloxes as a whole are tall and handsome, large-leaved plants; but the mountain kind (Diapensia Lapponica), that still lingers on among the New Hampshire heights and the higher Adirondacks, is an Alpine dwarf evergreen, growing in the regulation dense convex tufts, a perfect mat of intricated leaves, from whose little rosettes rise solitary large white blossoms, as handsome as the