Capitolo 86
weeping willow and this last mountain degraded representative of the
same primitive type, you can trace alone at least in Europe a dozen
intermediary forms and lists, mark well entirely in their differences and
it progressively made smaller entirely from long stress of the conditions of unfavourable.
From the combination of such unfavourable conditions in Arctic
countries and bottom the snow-line of mountains there the results a curious
fact, suggested already to on that the coldest floras are also, from
the purely human point of view, the most beautiful. Not, clearly, the
more luxuriant: for excessively drinks wealth of foliage and 'the width of tropic
shade' (to quote a noble gentleman) one has to go, as each knows, to the
equatorial regions. But, contrary to the common opinion, the tropics,
hoary imitations, are not extraordinary for the abundance or the beauty of them
flowers. Rather otherwise, indeed: a green strikes and not assuaged the
note of key of equatorial forests. This is mine really experiments, and it is
borne out (what it is far more main point) from the Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace,
who has seen a wider series of the intact tropics in all the four,
hemispheres--northern, southern, oriental, western--that some other man,
I suppose, that lived never on this planet. And the Mr. Wallace is fixed in
its sentence that the tropics in this respect are a complete fraud.
The bright flowers are rather evidently absent there. It is rather in
the cold and less regions of favoured of the world that one has to look for
floral and excellent shows and the bright masses of colour. Closes above to the
snow-line the wealth of flowers is always the greatest.
To understand this apparent paradox one owes to remember that the
taller type of flowers, from the point of view of organisation it is not
to the same one lasted by some means the most beautiful. On the contrary one,
plants with special very small adaptation to some particular bug,
as the water-lilies and the poppies, are forced to glorify ahead in