they have lots of honey,
often stored at the base of a deep and open bell which the long
proboscis of the insect can easily penetrate: and they habitually grow
close together in broad belts or patches, so that the colour of each
reinforces and aids the colour of the others. It is this cumulative
habit that accounts for the marked flowerbed or jam-tart character
which everybody must have noticed in the high Alpine flora.

Aristocracies usually pride themselves on their antiquity: and the high
life of the mountains is undeniably ancient. The plants and animals of
the butterfly-zone belong to a special group which appears everywhere
in Europe and America about the limit of snow, whether northward or
upward. For example, I was pleased to note near the summit of Mount
Washington (the highest peak in New Hampshire) that a large number of
the flowers belonged to species well known on the open plains of
Lapland and Finland. The plants of the High Alps are found also, as a
rule, not only on the High Pyrenees, the Carpathians, the Scotch
Grampians, and the Norwegian fjelds, but also round the Arctic Circle
in Europe and America. They reappear at long distances where suitable
conditions recur: they follow the snow-line as the snow-line recedes
ever in summer higher north toward the pole or higher vertically toward
the mountain summits. And this bespeaks in one way to the reasoning
mind a very ancient ancestry. It shows they date back to a very old and
cold epoch.

Let me give a single instance which strikingly illustrates the general
principle. Near the top of Mount Washington, as aforesaid, lives to
this day a little colony of very cold-loving and mountainous
butterflies, which never descend below a couple of thousand feet from
the wind-swept summit. Except just there, there are no more of there
sort anywhere about: and as far as the butterflies themselves are
aware, no others of their species exist on earth: they never have seen
a single one of their kind, save of their own little colony. One might
compare them with the Pitcairn Islanders in the South Seas--an isolated
group of English origin, cut off by a vast distance from all their
congeners in Europe or America. But if you go north some eight or nine
hundred miles from New Hampshire to Labrador, at a certain point the
same butterfly reappears, and spreads northward toward the pole in
great abundance. Now, how did this little colony of chilly insects get
separated from the