One little garden linaria, at first employed as
an ornament for hanging-baskets, has become so common on old walls and
banks as to be now considered a mere weed, and exterminated accordingly
by fashionable gardeners. Such are the unaccountable reverses of
fortune, that one age will pay fifty guineas a bulb for a plant which
the next age grubs up unanimously as a vulgar intruder. White of
Selborne noticed with delight in his own kitchen that rare insect, the
Oriental cockroach, lately imported; and Mr. Brewer observed with joy
in his garden at Reigate the blue Buxbaum speedwell, which is now the
acknowledged and hated pest of the Surrey agriculturist.
The history of some of these waifs and strays which go to make up the
wider population of Britain is indeed sufficiently remarkable. Like all
islands, England has a fragmentary fauna and flora, whose members have
often drifted towards it in the most wonderful and varied manner.
Sometimes they bear witness to ancient land connections, as in the case
of the spotted Portuguese slug which Professor Allman found calmly
disporting itself on the basking cliffs in the Killarney district. In
former days, when Spain and Ireland joined hands in the middle of the
Bay of Biscay, the ancestors of this placid Lusitanian mollusk must have
ranged (good word to apply to slugs) from the groves of Cintra to the
Cove of Cork. But, as time rolled on, the cruel crawling sea rolled on
also, and cut away all the western world from the foot of the Asturias
to Macgillicuddy's Reeks.
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