You must
study the plants of course, species by species. Take Watson's
"Cybele Britannica" and Moore's "Cybele Hibernica;" and let--as Mr.
Matthew Arnold would say--"your thought play freely about them."
Look carefully, too, in the case of each species, at the note on its
distribution, which you will find appended in Bentham's "Handbook,"
and in Hooker's "Student's Flora." Get all the help you can, if you
wish to work the subject out, from foreign botanists, both European
and American; and I think that, on the whole, you will come to some
such theory as this for a general starling platform. We do not owe
our flora--I must keep to the flora just now--to so many different
regions, or types, as Mr. Watson conceives, but to three, namely, an
European or Germanic flora, from the south-east; an Atlantic flora,
from the south-east; a Northern flora, from the north. These three
invaded us after the glacial epoch; and our general flora is their
result.
But this will cause you much trouble. Before you go a step farther
you will have to eliminate from all your calculations most of the
plants which Watson calls glareal, i.e. found in cultivated ground
about habitations. And what their limit may be I think we never
shall know. But of this we may be sure; that just as invading
armies always bring with them, in forage or otherwise, some plants
from their own country--just as the Cossacks, in 1815, brought more
than one Russian plant through Germany into France--just as you have
already a crop of North German plants upon the battle-fields of
France--thus do conquering races bring new plants.
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