Yet as late as the twelfth century itself,
even the true reindeer, the Arctic monarch of the Glacial Epoch, was
still hunted by Norwegian jarls of Orkney on the mainland of Caithness
and Sutherlandshire.
Second in age is the warm western and south-western type, the type
represented by the Portuguese slug, the arbutus trees and Mediterranean
heaths of the Killarney district, the flora of Cornwall and the Scilly
Isles, and the peculiar wild flowers of South Wales, Devonshire, and the
west country generally. This class belongs by origin to the submerged
land of Lyonesse, the warm champaign country that once spread westward
over the Bay of Biscay, and derived from the Gulf Stream the genial
climate still preserved by its last remnants at Tresco and St. Mary's.
The animals belonging to this secondary stratum of our British
population are few and rare, but of its plants there are not a few, some
of them extending over the whole western shores of England, Wales,
Scotland, and Ireland, wherever they are washed by the Gulf Stream, and
others now confined to particular spots, often with the oddest apparent
capriciousness. Thus, two or three southern types of clover are peculiar
to the Lizard Point, in Cornwall; a little Spanish and Italian
restharrow has got stranded in the Channel Islands and on the Mull of
Galloway; the spotted rock-rose of the Mediterranean grows only in
Kerry, Galway, and Anglesea; while other plants of the same warm habit
are confined to such spots as Torquay, Babbicombe, Dawlish, Cork,
Swansea, Axminster, and the Scilly Isles.
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