In a volume by W. Canton entitled _A Child's book of Saints_ a story is told in which the presence in Ireland of Mediterranean species receives a more picturesque explanation. The Monk Bresal was sent to teach the brethren in a Spanish monastery the music of Irish choirs. In later years Bresal longed for a sight of his native land, though he loved his home and 'every rock, tree, and flower' in his adopted country. After returning to Ireland, his thoughts reverted to Spain; 'it appeared to him as though he was once again in a granite nook among the rocks beside the Priory'; he saw the ice-plant with its little stars of white flowers sprinkled with red (the London Pride) and a small evergreen tree from which he had often gathered the orange-scarlet berries (Arbutus). The Prior of the Spanish monastery 'with heavenly vision saw Bresal gazing at the evergreen tree and the ice-plant, and turning to the trees blessed them and commended them to go and make real his dream. As Bresal brushed away his tears he saw with amazement at his feet the ice-plant and hard by the evergreen tree.' The plant represented in Fig. 2 is another British species which tasks the ingenuity of students of plant-geography. This is the Pipe Wort (_Eriocaulon septangulare_), the sole representative in Europe of a certain family of Monocotyledons: it flourishes in the west of Ireland and in the western islands of Scotland but nowhere else in Europe; it is native on the other side of the Atlantic in Canada and the northern United States of America. Mr Praeger in describing the striking mixture of species in the west of Ireland writes, 'The pool from which we gather the American Pipe Wort is fringed with Pyrenean Heathers. The cracks which are filled with the delicate green foam of the maiden hair are set in Bearberry and Spring Gentian; _Habenaria intacta_, far from its Mediterranean home, sends up its flower-spikes through carpets of mountain Avens; and St Dabeoc's Heath and the dwarf Juniper straggle together over the rocky knolls'(25).