But during
the greatest extension of the North-European ice-sheet it is probable
that life in London was completely extinct; the metropolitan area did
not even vegetate. Snow and snow and snow and snow was then the short
sum-total of British scenery. Murray's Guides were rendered quite
unnecessary, and penny ices were a drug in the market. England was given
up to one unchanging universal winter.
Slowly, however, times altered, as they are much given to doing; and a
new era dawned upon Britain. The thermometer rose rapidly, or at least
it would have risen, with effusion, if it had yet been invented. The
land emerged from the 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.
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