In the following chapters an attempt is made to deal, in a quite elementary way, with some of the wider aspects of plant life—to discuss questions which arise in the mind from a contemplation of the vegetation which clothes with a green mantle the surface of our own country. No essay is made to enumerate or define the plants to be met with in the different types of ground, or in the different geographical areas, which go to make up the British Isles: there are already plenty of excellent handboo

“I got up the mountain edge, and from the top saw the world stretcht out, cornlands and forest, the river winding among meadow-flats, and right off, like a hem of the sky, the moving sea.”— Maurice Hewlett : Pan and the Young Shepherd . Travelling from Scotland by the London and North-Western Railway, as the train roars down the long incline which leads from Shap to the coastal plain of Lancashire, the eye catches, on the left-hand side, a strange grey hill of bare rock rising abruptly, the last

“It is perhaps also proper to take into account the situation in which each plant naturally grows or does not grow. For this is an important distinction, and specially characteristic of plants, because they are united to the ground and not free from it like animals.”— Theophrastus : Enquiry into Plants , I. iv. Before setting about discussing the various types of vegetation which our own country presents, it will be well to have a general idea of the extent to which the main types are developed,

All organisms, animal as well as vegetable, are at some period of their existence provided with an opportunity of migration. In the animal world, most land creatures have legs or wings, which allow them to roam about freely—a freedom which is of special importance as enabling them to obtain nourishment and to avoid disadvantageous conditions. Aquatic animals are likewise to a great extent possessed of powers of locomotion, but such powers are not so essential to them as to terrestrial creatures,

The most important and fundamental difference between the animal and plant worlds is this: plants possess the power of manufacturing their food out of the inorganic materials of which it is composed, while animals cannot do this. Give an ordinary plant access to water with a pinch of mineral salts in it, to the air, and to sunlight, and by the agency of chlorophyll—the green colouring-matter of the leaves—the miracle will be accomplished, and dead materials transformed into living substance. Ani

In the course of the preceding chapters a number of the more striking modifications displayed by the different organs of plants have been described briefly. Reference has been made to the increased length or thickness of the roots in plants of dry places, and the weakness or absence of root-system of many water plants. Corresponding variation in stems has been noted. The remarkable leaves of desert and water plants and of some carnivorous species have been mentioned. The profound alteration in f

The appearance of man upon the Earth is an event of very recent occurrence, not only in terrestrial history, but in the history of organic life in the world. In the life-story which began somewhere in far pre-Cambrian times, the record of the whole of human activities occupies but the last paragraph of the last chapter. For millions of years—ever since the larger animals first abandoned the aquatic haunts of their ancestors and took to a terrestrial life—creatures great and small, of myriad kind

The dependence of animals upon plants for the food by means of which they continue to inhabit the earth, which was pointed out on a previous page (75), shows that the plant world is older than the animal world; but the immense age of both can be appreciated only by a study of stratigraphical geology. The tens of thousands of feet of sedimentary rocks, laid down in slow succession on the floors of ancient seas and lakes, and still reposing layer upon layer, and no less the great gaps in the serie

In the preceding chapters glimpses have been obtained of some of the wider aspects of plant life, particularly as seen on the hills and plains of our own country. The species composing our flora have been seen mostly, not as individuals, but as portions of regiments and armies, particular plants being mentioned but seldom, where required for purposes of illustration. In the final chapter it will be well to abandon this collective treatment, and glance at a few individual species or genera or sma