[44] Kerner, _Natural History of Plants_ (Blackie), vol. 1, p. 468. In this country we have no such magnificent chain of mountains as the Alps, and yet we find on the Scotch and Welsh mountains quite a number of real alpines. There are, for instance, such flowers as Sea-pink (_Armeria_), Sea Plantain (_Plantago maritima_), Scurvy-grass, and others, which can be found on windy, desolate gullies and corries high up on the Highland hills, and which also occur on the sea-coast, but _never between the seashore and the tops of the mountains_. You might search every field, every moor, and every riverside throughout the country, but you would not discover those three plants anywhere between the seashore and the summits. At first sight it seems quite impossible to explain why this should be the case. But all those three plants are found in the Arctic regions, and the explanation is in reality quite simple. At one time the shores of England and Scotland formed part of the Arctic regions. Ice and snow covered the hills and mountains; huge glaciers occupied the valleys and flowed over the lowlands, plastering the low grounds with clay which they dragged underneath them, and polishing and scratching any exposed rocks. When the ice began to melt away and left free "berg battered beaches" and "boulder-hatched hills," Lincolnshire and Yorkshire must have been like the Antarctic regions in those days. This is how Dr. Louis Bernacchi describes the Antarctic continent:-- "The scene before us looked inexpressibly desolate.... No token of vitality anywhere, nothing to be seen on the steep slopes of the mountains but rock and ice.... Gravel and pebbles were heaped up in mounds and ridges. In some places these ridges coalesced so as to form basin-shaped hollows. Bleached remains of thousands of penguins were scattered all over the platform, mostly young birds that had succumbed to the severity of the climate." Great Britain must have been just as savage and desolate when these hardy little Arctic plants colonized the shingles and rooted themselves amongst the rocks. They covered not only the seashore, but they probably made a settlement wherever rock or land of any kind was exposed. These original settlers have had three bands of descendants. One band has remained ever since on the seashore of Great Britain; another set gradually travelled northwards. As the ice melted away, leaving the land bare, first in Denmark, then in Norway, and finally in Greenland, this second set followed it, until now we find them far to the northward, populating the Arctic regions of to-day just as they did those of Britain in the Great Ice Age.