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Page 64
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?
Well: but it seems so strange.
So it is, my child; and so is everything. But, as the fool says in
Shakespeare--
"A long time ago the world began,
With heigh ho, the wind and the rain."
And the wind and the rain have made strange work with the poor old world
ever since. And that is about all that we, who are not very much wiser
than Shakespeare's fool, can say about the matter. But again--the London
Pride grows here, and so does another saxifrage very like it, which we
call Saxifraga Geum. Now, when I saw those two plants growing in the
Western Pyrenees, between France and Spain, and with them the beautiful
blue butterwort, which grows in these Kerry bogs--we will go and find
some--what could I say but that Spain and Ireland must have been joined
once?
I suppose it must be so.
Again. There is a little pink butterwort here in the bogs, which grows,
too, in dear old Devonshire and Cornwall; and also in the south-west of
Scotland. Now, when I found that too, in the bogs near Biarritz, close
to the Pyrenees, and knew that it stretched away along the Spanish coast,
and into Portugal, what could my common sense lead me to say but that
Scotland, and Ireland, and Cornwall, and Spain were all joined once?
Those are only a few examples. I could give you a dozen more. For
instance, on an island away there to the west, and only in one spot,
there grows a little sort of lily, which is found I believe in Brittany,
and on the Spanish and Portuguese heaths, and even in North-west Africa.
And that Africa and Spain were joined not so very long ago at the Straits
of Gibraltar there is no doubt at all.
But where did the Mediterranean Sea run out then?
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