The same would hold good of our mountains; and, if so, we may look with respect, even awe, on the Alpine plants of Wales, Scotland, and the Lake mountains, as organisms, stunted it may be, and even degraded by their long battle with the elements, but venerable from their age, historic from their endurance.  Relics of an older temperate world, they have lived through thousands of centuries of frost and fog, to sun themselves in a temperate climate once more.  I can never pick one of them without a tinge of shame; and to exterminate one of them is to destroy, for the mere pleasure of collecting, the last of a family which God has taken the trouble to preserve for thousands of centuries.

I trust that these hints—­for I can call them nothing more—­will at least awaken any young naturalist who has hitherto only collected natural objects, to study the really important and interesting question—­How did these things get here?

Now hence arise questions which may puzzle the mind of a Hampshire naturalist.  You have in this neighbourhood, as you well know, two, or rather three, soils, each carrying its peculiar vegetation.  First, you have the clay lying on the chalk, and carrying vast woodlands, seemingly primeval.  Next, you have the chalk, with its peculiar, delicate, and often fragrant crop of lime-loving plants; and next, you have the poor sands and clays of the New Forest basin, saturated with iron, and therefore carrying a moorland or peat-loving vegetation, in many respects quite different from the others.  And this moorland soil, and this vegetation, with a few singular exceptions, repeats itself, as I daresay you know, in the north of the county, in the Bagshot basin, as it is called—­the moors of Aldershot, Hartford Bridge, and Windsor Forest.

Now what a variety of interesting questions are opened up by these simple facts.  How did these three floras get each to its present place?  Where did each come from?  How did it get past or through the other, till each set of plants, after long internecine competition, settled itself down in the sheet of land most congenial to it?  And when did each come hither?  Which is the oldest?  Will any one tell me whether the healthy floras of the moors, or the thymy flora of the chalk downs, were the earlier inhabitants of these isles?  To these questions I cannot get any answer; and they cannot be answered without, first—­a very careful study of the range of each species of plant on the continent of Europe; and next, without careful study of those stupendous changes in the shape of this island which have taken place at a very late geological epoch.  The composition of the flora of our moorlands is as yet to me an utter puzzle.  We have Lycopodiums—­three species—­enormously ancient forms which have survived the age of ice:  but did they crawl downward hither from the northern mountains or upward hither from the Pyrenees?  We have the beautiful bog asphodel again—­an enormously ancient