malcule to man, sympathizing and uniting, as
members of one great race, in our adoration of the sun. And in doing
this we men are for the moment close to and in happy fellowship with
our beautiful, though speechless, relatives who also live. Even the
destructive bacteria which are killed by the sun probably enjoy an
exquisite shudder in the process which more than compensates them for
their extinction.

The pleasures of flower-seeking in Switzerland are by no means
confined to the great heights. At moderate heights (4,000 to 5,000
feet) you have the Alpine meadows, and below those the rich-soiled
woods which fill in the sides of the torrent-worn valleys. You cannot
see an Alpine meadow after July, as it is cut down by then. It is at
its best in June. It bears very little grass, and consists almost
entirely of flowers. In places the hare-bells and Canterbury bells and
the bugloss are so abundant as to make a whole valley-floor blue as in
MacWhirter's picture. But more often the blue is intermixed with the
balls of, red clover and the spikes of a splendid pale pink polygonum
(a sort of buckwheat) and of a very large and handsome plantain. Large
yellow gentians, mulleins, the nearly black and the purple orchids,
vetches of all colours, the Alpine clover with four or five enormous
flowers in a head instead of fifty little ones, the Astrantias (like a
circular brooch made up of fifty gems each mounted on a long elastic
wire and set vibrating side by side), the sky-blue forget-me-nots, and
the golden potentillas, are usually components of the Alpine meadow.
At Murren, and no doubt commonly elsewhere, there are a few very
beautiful grasses among the flowers, but the most remarkable grass is
one (_Poa alpina_), which has on every spikelet or head a bright green
serpent-like streamer. Each of these "streamers" is, in fact, a young
grass-plant, budded off "viviparously," as it is called, from the
flower-head, or "spikelet," and having nothing to do with the proper
fertilized seed or grain. The young plants so budded fall to the
ground, and striking root rapidly, grow into separate individuals. It
is probably owing to some condition in Alpine meadows adverse to the
production of fertilized seed that this viviparous method of
reproduction has been favoured, since it occurs also in an Alpine
meadow-plant allied to the buckwheat, namely, _Polygonum viviparum_
(not the kind mentioned above), where the lower flowers are converted
into