Of course it is. You are here in the land of perpetual spring, where frost and snow seldom, or never comes.
Oh, look at the ferns under this rock! I must pick some.
Pick away. I will warrant you do not pick all the sorts.
Yes. I have got them all now.
Not so hasty, child; there is plenty of a beautiful fern growing among that moss, which you have passed over. Look here.
What! that little thing a fern!
Hold it up to the light, and see.
What a lovely little thing, like a transparent sea-weed, hung on black wire. What is it?
Film fern, Hymenophyllum. But what are you staring at now, with all your eyes?
Oh! that rock covered with green stars and a cloud of little white and pink flowers growing out of them.
Aha! my good little dog! I thought you would stand to that game when you found it.
What is it, though?
You must answer that yourself. You have seen it a hundred times before.
Why, it is London Pride, that grows in the garden at home.
Of course it is: but the Irish call it St. Patrick's cabbage; though it got here a long time before St. Patrick; and St. Patrick must have been very short of garden-stuff if he ever ate it.
But how did it get here from London?
No, no. How did it get to London from hence? For from this country it came. I suppose the English brought it home in Queen Bess's or James the First's time.
But if it is wild here, and will grow so well in England, why do we not find it wild in England too?
For the same reason that there are no toads or snakes in Ireland.
They had not got as far as Ireland before Ireland was parted off from England. And St. Patrick's cabbage, and a good many other plants, had not got as far as England.
But why?
Why, I don't know. But this I know: that when Madam How makes a new sort of plant or animal, she starts it in one single place, and leaves it to take care of itself and earn its own living--as she does you and me and every one--and spread from that place all round as far as it can go. So St. Patrick's cabbage got into this south-west of Ireland, long, long ago; and was such a brave sturdy little plant, that it clambered up to the top of the highest mountains, and over all the rocks. But when it got to the rich lowlands to the eastward, in county Cork, it found all the ground taken up already with other plants; and as they had enough to do to live themselves, they would not let St. Patrick's cabbage settle among them; and it had to be content with living here in the far-west--and, what was very sad, had no means of sending word to its brothers and sisters in the Pyrenees how it was getting on.
What do you mean? Are you ****** fun of me?
Not the least. I am only telling you a very strange story, which is literally true. Come, and sit down on this bench. You can't catch that great butterfly, he is too strong on the wing for you.
But oh, what a beautiful one!
Yes, orange and black, silver and green, a glorious creature. But you may see him at home sometimes: that plant close to you, you cannot see at home.
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?
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."
