sea, and southern plants and animals began to
invade the area that was afterwards to be England, across the broad belt
which then connected us with the Continental system. But in those days
communications were slow and land transit difficult. You had to foot it.
The European fauna and flora moved but gradually and tentatively
north-westward, and before any large part of it could settle in England
our island was finally cut off from the mainland by the long and gradual
wearing away of the cliffs at Dover and Calais. That accounts for the
comparative poverty of animal and vegetable life in England, and still
more for its extreme paucity and meagreness in Ireland and the
Highlands. It has been erroneously asserted, for example, that St.
Patrick expelled snakes and lizards, frogs and toads, from the soil of
Erin. This detail, as the French newspapers politely phrase it, is
inexact. St. Patrick did not expel the reptiles, because there were
never any reptiles in Ireland (except dynamiters) for him to expel. The
creatures never got so far on their long and toilsome north-westward
march before St. George's Channel intervened to prevent their passage
across to Dublin. It is really, therefore, to St. George, rather than to
St. Patrick, that the absence of toads and snakes from the soil of
Ireland is ultimately due. The doubtful Cappadocian prelate is well
known to have been always death on dragons and serpents.

As long ago as the sixteenth century, indeed, Verstegan the antiquary
clearly saw that the existence of badgers and foxes in England implied
the former presence of a belt of land joining the British Islands to the
Continent of Europe; for, as he acutely observed, nobody (before
fox-hunting, at least) would ever have taken the trouble to bring them
over. Still more does the presence in our islands of the red deer, and
formerly of the wild white cattle, the wolf, the bear, and the wild
boar, to say nothing of the beaver, the otter, the squirrel, and the
weasel, prove that England was once conterminous with France or Belgium.
At the very best of times, however, before Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel
had killed positively the last 'last wolf' in Britain (several other
'last wolves' having previously been despatched by various earlier
intrepid exterminators), our English fauna was far from a rich one,
especially as regards the larger quadrupeds. In bats, birds, and insects
we have always done better, because to such creatures a be