Now didn't it turn out just as I said; that the butterflies themselves help brighten the flowers that grow among these ice fields? I have something else quite as curious to tell you: _Both the Alpine butterflies and the flowers were left over from the Ice Age._ Not in the same sense that we pebbles were, for we are the identical little passengers who rode in on the ice trains, and the life of a butterfly, as every one knows, is very short. So is that of a flower. Yet suppose you found that the only other butterflies and flowers like these are found, not among the flowers and butterflies in the lands lower down in the Alps but up toward the Arctic Zone, in Finland and Lapland; in the snow regions of mountains in the temperate zone all over the world? It would look very much as if these flowers and butterflies, or their ancestors, had been left behind there some time or other, wouldn't it? This is what the men of science think, and they reason about it in this way: HOW THE BUTTERFLIES MISSED THE TRAIN As the glaciers spread downward from the Far North in the Ice Age they brought all their home things with them--climate, plants, insects, animals. Plant and animal life was driven step by step before the advancing ice. Then, as the ice melted, flowers, butterflies, and all followed their natural climate back. But those that lingered too long in the meadows around the mountain tops could not cross the hot summer plains that now lay between them and the retiring ice sheet; for plants and animals that are used to cold can't stand the heat any more than those from the tropics can stand the cold. So only the flowers and butterflies remained in the temperate zone that found their natural climate among the mountain peaks and stayed there. Near the top of Mount Washington, the highest peak in New Hampshire, is a colony of the descendants of these butterfly pilgrims from the north who never leave their high and wind swept meadows. There are no such butterflies in the hills and plains below, but go into Labrador and you will see plenty of them. LEFT-OVER PIECES OF THE ICE AGE Of course you understood all along that these aren't the very same butterflies that came with the glaciers, yet in shady glens in high mountains, where the snow never melts, people do sometimes find masses of ice, which, there is every reason to believe, have been there since the Ice Age. And sometimes thick veins of ice, buried hundreds of feet under pebbles, boulders and soil, are struck in sinking wells. These are known as ice wells; huge ice water tanks that never need filling! II. A Little Visit with the Glaciers