So the spotted slug continued to survive in
two distinct and divided bodies, a large one in South-western Europe,
and a small isolated colony, all alone by itself, around the Kerry
mountains and the Lakes of Killarney. At other times pure accident
accounts for the presence of a particular species in the mainlands of
Britain. For example, the Bermuda grass-lily, a common American plant,
is known in a wild state nowhere in Europe save at a place called
Woodford, in county Galway. Nobody ever planted it there; it has simply
sprung up from some single seed, carried over, perhaps, on the feet of a
bird, or cast ashore by the Gulf Stream on the hospitable coast of
Western Ireland. Yet there it has flourished and thriven ever since, a
naturalised British subject of undoubted origin, without ever spreading
to north or south above a few miles from its adopted habitat.
There are several of these unconscious American importations in various
parts of Britain, some of them, no doubt, brought over with seed-corn or
among the straw of packing-cases, but others unconnected in any way with
human agency, and owing their presence here to natural causes. That
pretty little Yankee weed, the claytonia, now common in parts of
Lancashire and Oxfordshire, first made its appearance amongst us, I
believe, by its seeds being accidentally included with the sawdust in
which Wenham Lake ice is packed for transport. The Canadian river-weed
is known first to have escaped from the botanical gardens at Cambridge,
whence it spread rapidly through the congenial dykes and sluices of the
fen country, and so into the entire navigable network of the Midland
counties.
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