Why, it is only great spurge, such as grows in the woods at home.

No.  It is Irish spurge which grows here, and sometimes in Devonshire, and then again in the west of Europe, down to the Pyrenees.  Don’t touch it.  Our wood spurge is poisonous enough, but this is worse still; if you get a drop of its milk on your lip or eye, you will be in agonies for half a day.  That is the evil plant with which the poachers kill the salmon.

How do they do that?

When the salmon are spawning up in the little brooks, and the water is low, they take that spurge, and grind it between two stones under water, and let the milk run down into the pool; and at that all the poor salmon turn up dead.  Then comes the water-bailiff, and catches the poachers.  Then comes the policeman, with his sword at his side and his truncheon under his arm:  and then comes a “cheap journey” to Tralee Gaol, in which those foolish poachers sit and reconsider themselves, and determine not to break the salmon laws—­at least till next time.

But why is it that this spurge, and St. Patrick’s cabbage, grow only here in the west?  If they got here of themselves, where did they come from?  All outside there is sea; and they could not float over that.

Come, I say, and sit down on this bench, and I will tell you a tale,—­the story of the Old Atlantis, the sunken land in the far West.  Old Plato, the Greek, told legends of it, which you will read some day; and now it seems as if those old legends had some truth in them, after all.  We are standing now on one of the last remaining scraps of the old Atlantic land.  Look down the bay.  Do you see far away, under, the mountains, little islands, long and low?

Oh, yes.

Some of these are old slate, like the mountains; others are limestone; bits of the old coral-reef to the west of Ireland which became dry land.

I know.  You told me about it.

Then that land, which is all eaten up by the waves now, once joined Ireland to Cornwall, and to Spain, and to the Azores, and I suspect to the Cape of Good Hope, and what is stranger, to Labrador, on the coast of North America.

Oh!  How can you know that?

Listen, and I will give you your first lesson in what I call Bio-geology.

What a long word!

If you can find a shorter one I shall be very much obliged to you, for I hate long words.  But what it means is,—­Telling how the land has changed in shape, by the plants and animals upon it.  And if you ever read (as you will) Mr. Wallace’s new book on the Indian Archipelago, you will see what wonderful discoveries men may make about such questions if they will but use their common sense.  You know the common pink heather—­ling, as we call it?

Of course.

Then that ling grows, not only here and in the north and west of Europe, but in the Azores too; and, what is more strange, in Labrador.  Now, as ling can neither swim nor fly, does not common sense tell you that all those countries were probably joined together in old times?