Whole volumes
remain to be written on this subject. I trust that some of your
younger members may live to write one of them. The way to begin
will be; to compare the flora and fauna of this part of England very
carefully with that of the southern and eastern counties; and then
to compare them again with the fauna and flora of France, Belgium,
and Holland.
As for the Atlantic flora, you will have to decide for yourselves
whether you accept or not the theory of a sunken Atlantic continent.
I confess that all objections to that theory, however astounding it
may seem, are outweighed in my mind by a host of facts which I can
explain by no other theory. But you must judge for yourselves; and
to do so you must study carefully the distribution of heaths both in
Europe and at the Cape, and their non-appearance beyond the Ural
Mountains, and in America, save in Labrador, where the common ling,
an older and less specialised form, exists. You must consider, too,
the plants common to the Azores, Portugal, the West of England,
Ireland, and the Western Hebrides. In so doing young naturalists
will at least find proofs of a change in the distribution of land
and water, which will utterly astound them when they face it for the
first time.
As for the Northern flora, the question whence it came is puzzling
enough. It seems difficult to conceive how any plants could have
survived when Scotland was an archipelago in the same ice-covered
condition as Greenland is now; and we have no proof that there
existed after the glacial epoch any northern continent from which
the plants and animals could have come back to us.
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