Holidays on high lands

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Chapter I. The Plants On The Summits Of The Highland Mountains

A THOUGHTFUL man, standing beneath the silent magnificence of the midnight heavens, is more deeply impressed by what is suggested than by what is revealed. He cannot gaze upon the solitary splendour of Sirius, or the clustered glories of Orion, without a vague unuttered wish to know whether these orbs are inhabited, and what are the nature and conditions of existence there. A similar feeling of curiosity seizes us when we behold afar off the summits of a lofty range of mountains, lying along the golden west like the shores of another and a brighter world. Elevated far above the busy commonplace haunts of men, rearing their mystic heads into the clouds, they seem to claim affinity with the heavens, and, like the stars, to dwell apart, retiring into a more awful and sacred solitude than exists on the surface of the jarth. We long for the wings of the eagle, to surmount in a moment all intervening obstacles, ind reach the shores of that upper world, that we

B may know what strange arrangements of matter, what new forms of life, occur in a region so near to and so favoured of the skies. To many individuals destitute of the strength of limb and soundness of lung necessary to climb the mountain side, or chained hopelessly to the monotonous employments by which the daily bread fs earned, this must ever be an unattainable enjoyment— in sight, and yet unknown. Even of the thousands of tourists who as duly as the autumn comes round swarm over the familiar Highland routes, very few turn aside to behold this great sight. Only a solitary adventurous pedestrian, smitten with the love of science or of natural scenery, now and then cares to diverge from the beaten paths, from the region of coaches and extortionate hotel-keepers, in order to explore the primeval solitudes of the higher hills. For these and other reasons, a brief description of the characteristic vegetation of the Highland mountains may prove interesting and instructive to many. The information I have to lay before the reader has been acquired with much toil during many summer wanderings ; and if it should be the means of opening up to any one the way to a new field of research and a new set of sensations, I shall have much pleasure in the thought that my holidays have yielded other and higher than mere selfish benefits.

Mountains exercise a peculiar and powerful fascination over the imagination. They transport us out of the fictitious atmosphere of civilization, l] the poetry of MOUNTAINS. 3

and the cramping air of the world of taskwork, into the region of poetry and freedom. Among their serene and quiet retreats the fevered conventional life, brought face to face with the purity and the calm of nature, reverts to its primitive simplicity, the mind recovers its original elasticity, and the heart glows with its native warmth. Every individual finds in them something to admire, and to suit the tendencies of his mind. To the patriot they are the monuments of history, which have attracted to themselves, by kindred sympathy, some of the most remarkable events in the life of nations — guardians of liberty, whose high, embattled ridges form an impenetrable rampart against the invading foe, and nourish within their fastnesses a hardy race, free as their own wild winds. To the poet they are the altars of nature, on which the golden-robed sun offers his morning | and evening sacrifice — footstools of God, before which his soul kneels, hushed in awe and reverence. To the philosophers they are the theatres in which the mightiest forces of nature are seen in intensest action, — the storehouses in which are treasured up all the sources of earth's beauty and fertility. While to the devotional mind they are types of the stability of the Christian promises, — emblems of the Infinite, the Eternal, and the Unchangeable.

The fascination which mountains exercise extends to all that is connected with them. Their own sublimity and grandeur are reflected, as it

B 2 were, upon all their productions ; and the lowliest object that hides under their shadow, or is nourished by their soil, acquires from that circumstance an importance which does not intrinsically belong to it. Hence the peculiar charm which all botanists find in the pursuit of Alpine botany. The plants which grow upon the rugged sides and the bleak storm-scalped summits of the mountains, cannot generally be compared, in point of variety and beauty of colouring, and luxuriance of growth, with the flowers of the plains. They are for the most part tiny plants that, among their leaves of light, have no need of flowers — harmonizing in all their characters with their dreary habitats, and claiming apparently a closer affinity to the grey lichens and the brown mosses among which they nestle, than to their bright sisters of the valleys. But their comparative rarity, the magnificent and almost boundless prospects obtained from their elevated haunts, and the exhilarating nature of the mountain breezes and wild scenery, invest them with a halo of interest far exceeding that connected with woodland flowers ; and a glowing enthusiasm is felt in their collection which cannot be experienced in the tamer and less adventurous pursuit of lowland botany.

The Highland mountains occupy but a very subsidiary position among the great mountain ranges of the earth. The highest peak in which they culminate does not reach the line of perpetual snow. No avalanche thunders over their precipices

I.] CHARACTER OF HIGHLAND MOUNTAINS. 5

to bury the villages at their base in ruins ; no glacier brings eternal winter down from his elevated throne into the midst of green cornfields and cultivated valleys, or yawns in dangerous crevasses across the traveller's path ; no volcano reddens the horizon with its lurid smoke and flame. Ages innumerable have passed away since the glacier flowed down their sides, and left its polished or striated marks on the rocks, to be deciphered by the skill of the geologist ; and those hills which once passed through a fiery ordeal, and poured their volcanic floods over the surrounding districts, now form the firmest foundations of the land, and afford quiet grassy pasturages for the sheep. Our mountains, indeed, possess few or none of those sublime attributes which invest the lofty ranges of other lands with gloom and terror. Their very storms are usually subdued, as if in harmony with their humbler forms. Though they tower to the sky, they seem nearer to the familiar earth ; and a large share of the beauty and verdure of the plains do they lift up with them in their rugged arms for the blessing of heaven. Every part of their domains is free and open to the active foot of the wanderer. There are few or no inaccessible precipices or profound abysses to form barriers in his way. He can plant his foot on their highest summits with little expenditure of breath and toil ; and a few hours will bring him from the stir and tumult of life in the heart of the populous city to their loneliest and wildest recesses.

Well do I know and love my native hills ; for I have spent some of the happiest days of my life in wandering amid their solitudes, following my fancies fearlessly wherever they led me. I have seen them in all seasons, and in all their varied aspects : — in the dim dawn, when, swathed in cold dark clouds, they seemed like awful countenances veiled, yet speaking in the tongues of a hundred unseen Waterfalls ; in the still noon-day, when, illumined with sunshine, every cliff and scar on their sides stood out distinctly and prominently against the pure clear sky ; at sunset, when, amid the 'masses of burnished gold that lay piled up in the west — the glow of fire that burns without consuming — they seemed like the embers of a universal conflagration ; in the holy twilight, when they appeared to melt into the purple beauty of a dream, and the golden summer moon and the soft bright star of eve rose solemnly over their brows, lighting them up with a mystical radiance ; and in the lone dark waste of midnight, when from lake and river the long trailing mists crept up their sides without hiding their far-off summits, on which twinkled, like earth-lighted watch-fires, a few uncertain stars. I have gazed upon them in the beauty of summer, when the heather was in full bloom, and for miles they glowed in masses of the loveliest purple ; in the changing splendour of autumn, when the deep green of the herbage gave place to the russet hues of the fading flowers, the rich orange of the ferns, and the dark brown

I.] EARLY EXPLORATION. 7

of the mosses ; and in the dreary depth of winter, when storms during the whole twilight-day howled around them, or when, robed from foot to crown in a garment of the purest snow, they seemed meet approaches to " the great white Throne." In all these aspects they were beautiful, and in all they excited thoughts and emotions which no human language could adequately express.

Offering such facilities for search, it is not surprising that the vegetable productions of the British mountains should have been thoroughly investigated. Long before Botany became organized as a distinct science, our Alpine flora attracted a large share of the attention of scientific men. In the days of Linnaeus — stimulated by the enthusiastic impulse communicated by that remarkable man to every department of physical research — a band of devoted botanists undertook the exploration of the Highland mountains ; a task by no means so easy then as in this age of steamboats and railroads. The whole of the northern districts encircled by the mighty ramparts of the Grampian range was a terra incognita — virtually almost as remote from the civilized regions beyond as the wilds of Labrador. There were no roads, no conveyances, or other means of communication with the south. The adventurous men who first ! opened up this wild territory to the researches of science were peculiarly adapted for the task of practical scientific pioneers. Endowed with vigorous frames and strong constitutions, they could endure a great amount of privation and fatigue with impunity. The names of Menzies, Lightfoot, Dickson, Stewart, and Don are familiar to every botanist as those of men who contended with innumerable obstacles in the prosecution of their favourite science, then in its feeblest infancy, and popularly regarded with indifference, if not with contempt. The memory of the last-mentioned botanist especially is firmly engrafted in botanical literature, in connexion with his great services in this department. Such was his enthusiastic love of Alpine plants, that he spent whole months at a time collecting them among the gloomy solitudes of the Grampians ; his only food a little meal, or a bit of crust moistened in the mountain burn, and his only couch a bed of heather or moss in the shelter of a rock. Before the storms of winter were over, and while the i snow still lay far down on the sides of the mountains, he began his wanderings in search of his favourites ; and often did he linger on till the • last autumn flower withered in the red October sunlight, and the shortening days and scowling heavens warned him of the universal desolation fast approaching. The whole of Western Aberdeenshire and Northern Forfarshire and Perthshire — where the loftiest mountains of Britain have congregated together, storming the sky in every direction with their gigantic peaks, and filling the j whole visible scene with themselves and their shadows — was almost as familiar to him as the

I.] ALPINE BOTANISTS. 9

circumscribed landscape around his native place. Nothing of any interest or importance on these great ranges escaped his eagle eye ; and from his numerous visits, and his lengthened sojourn among them, he was enabled to make many interesting discoveries, and to add an unusually large number of species to the flora of Britain. His discoveries were speedily followed up by others, especially by those of Dr. Greville, whose death has been one of the greatest losses to botanical science. Professors Graham and Hooker year after year conducted their pupils to the summits of the Highland hills ; and, not satisfied with a mere cursory visit, they carried tents and provisions with them, and encamped for a week or a fortnight in spots favourable for their investigations. So frequently within the last few years — particularly under the able leadership of Professor Balfour, whose annual class excursions are well known throughout Scotland, and highly prized by all who have the privilege of sharing in them, and by the exertions of the "Scottish Botanical Alpine Club" — have the vegetable productions of the principal mountain ranges been investigated, that the most lynx-eyed botanist can now scarcely hope to do more than add a new station for some of the rarer plants.

Only two organic forms — the common Red Grouse among animals, and the Neottia gemmipera, a species of orchid growing in the south of Ireland, among plants — seem to be peculiar to Great Britain. With these exceptions, all its fauna and flora consist of forms that have come from the adjacent continent of Europe, at periods more or less remote. A single plant, the jointed Pipe-wort (Eriocaulon septangulare), occurs in Glen Sligachan in the Isle of Skye, and in Connemara in the west of Ireland, and nowhere else, in Europe. It is a North American plant, and has no doubt been introduced naturally into the British Isles by means of transport now or anciently in action, very probably by the influence of the Gulf-stream, which frequently casts on the shores of the Hebrides the productions of the Western Hemisphere. Taking a comprehensive view of the plants of Great Britain, the botanist will find that, excluding exotic species derived from other countries along with the seed of our cultivated plants by direct human agency, they may be included in four tolerably distinct groups, which, from their relations to the flora of other parts of Europe, point to a diversified origin. By far the largest portion of our vegetation is composed of forms which are abundant over the whole of Central and Western Europe, and, from their common occurrence on both sides of the German Ocean, have received the name of Germanic plants. In the south-western and southern counties of England we find a numerous assemblage of plants which are seen nowhere else in the British Isles, and which, from their close relation to the flora of the north-west of France and the Channel Islands, have been denominated plants of the French type. A small but very distinct group of

I.] PECULIARITIES OF HIGHLAND FLORA. 11

hardy and prolific species is confined to the mountainous districts in the west and south-west of Ireland. These plants, numbering upwards of a score, are forms either peculiar to, or abundant in, the peninsula of Spain and Portugal, and especially in Asturias. Lastly, we have the Highland type, which comprehends the species limited to the mountains and their immediate vicinity. This class embraces all the Alpine plants, and contains about a fifteenth of the whole flora of Britain — the number of distinct species amounting to upwards of a hundred.

To the most superficial observer, viewed as a whole, Alpine plants will appear strikingly different -from those which he is accustomed to see beside his path in the low grounds. The Laplanders and Esquimaux are not more unlike the inhabitants of England and Scotland, than the Alpine flora is unlike that of the plains. The flowers which deck the woods and fields have no representatives in this lofty region. The traveller leaves them one after the other behind when he ascends beyond a certain elevation ; and though a few hardy kinds do succeed in climbing to the very summit, they assume strange forms which puzzle the eye, and become dwarfed and stunted by the severer climate and the ungenial soil. All the way up, from a line of altitude varying, according to the character of the mountain range, between two and three thousand feet, you are in the midst of a new floral world, genera and species as unfamiliar as though you had been suddenly and unconsciously spirited away to a foreign country. There are a few isolated islands scattered over the ocean, whose forms of life are unique. St. Helena and the Galapagos Archipelago are such centres of creation, having nothing in common with the nearest mainland. It is the same with the mountain summits in this country that are higher than three thousand feet. They may be compared to islands in an aerial ocean, having a climate and animal and vegetable productions quite distinct from those of the low grounds. Their plants grow in thick masses, covering extensive surfaces with a soft carpet of moss-like foliage, and producing a profusion of blossoms, large in proportion to the size of the leaves, and often of brilliant shades of red, white, and blue; or they creep along the ground in thickly interwoven woody branches, wholly depressed, sending out at intervals a few hard, wrinkled leaves, and very small, faintlycoloured, and inconspicuous flowers. Their roots are usually very woody, or, like those of bulbous plants, wrapped up in membraneous coverings ; and their stems are strongly inclined to form buds. They are almost all perennial, the number of annuals being exceedingly small. In all these typical peculiarities, which, it may be remarked, are special adaptations to the unfavourable circumstances in which they are placed, they bear a very close resemblance to the plants of the Polar Zone ; and this similarity in the character of the

I.} MOUNTAIN PLANTS OF JAVA. 13

vegetation may be traced from the Arctic regions to the Equator, if we compare, on the mountains of the different zones, the corresponding higher regions, where the isothermal lines are the same, with each other. It must be understood, however, that, except in cases where the plants were originally derived from one centre of distribution, through migration over continuous or closely continuous land, the relationship of Alpine and Arctic vegetation in the Southern Hemisphere, under similar conditions with that of the Northern, is entirely maintained by representative, and not by identical species — the representation, too, being in great part generic^ and not specific.

Strange to say, though so near Europe, the lofty peak of Teneriffe contains on its sides and summit no Alpine flora of a European type. The Retamas of the highest zone are as peculiar to the island as the Euphorbias of the lowest. This absence of northern forms is probably owing to the immense amount of the radiation and the unfavourable hygrometrical conditions of the locality. An equal destitution of Alpine vegetation has been observed on the mountains of Bourbon and Mauritius. On the isolated volcanic peaks of Java, however, though south of the equator, we have plants closely allied to those of the Grampians, while a totally different class of plants clothes the lowlands for thousands of miles around. At a height of 8000 feet, on the Pangerango mountain, in Java, Mr. Wallace found upwards of forty species, representing European and Alpine genera, and four species actually identical with European species. The Artemisia or southernwood, and the ribwort plantain — the commonest weeds in every British field — occur on this peak at a height of 9000 feet. Beside them, in the damp shade of the thickets, is found the royal cowslip [primula imperialis), which has a tall stout stem more than three feet high, with root-leaves eight inches long, and having, instead of a single terminal cluster of cowslip-like flowers, several tiers or whorls, one above another, like a Chinese pagoda. This gorgeous cowslip is found nowhere else in the world but on this solitary mountain -summit. On the higher slopes of the Himalayas, and on the tops of the mountains of Central India and Abyssinia, a great many European genera are found, whose existence in such spots Mr. Darwin believes to be owing to the depression of temperature that was so general during the glacial epoch, as to allow a few north temperate plants to cross the equator by the most elevated routes of mountainchains, and to reach the Antarctic regions where they are now found. He believes that the plants on the equatorial summits and the Alpine plants of Europe sprang from a common parentage, and that the modifications which the former have undergone are owing entirely to altered conditions operating during a long period of time. In New Zealand, which is the head-quarters of the Composite as well as the ferns, a very remarkable

I.] NEW ZEALAND COMPOSITE PLANTS. 15

genus of composite plants, called Raoulia^ occurs on the sides and summits of the loftier mountains. It numbers twelve distinct species, all of which range from 3000 to 7000 feet on Mounts Cook and Doban, and the Nelson and Otago mountains, and form dense wide-spreading carpets or cushions. The down on the leaves is developed to such an extent as to completely cover them, and almost to conceal the star-like flower-heads. One species, the R. eximia, forms gigantic white woolly masses on the ground, and looks at a distance like a flock of sheep grazing on the mountain-side. Indeed the shepherds are so often deceived by them when folding their charge, that the plant has come to be known among the settlers as the " vegetable sheep." This curious genus represents in New Zealand the common cat's-paw or mountain everlasting [Antennaria dioica), whose dry white or pink flowers and downy leaves cover our moorlands in myriads ; or rather, perhaps, the closely-allied Gnaphalium supinum, a tiny cudweed which grows on the extreme summits of the highest Highland mountains. There is one Alpine Gnaphalium, found in almost every part of the Alps from 6500 to 8500 feet above the sea, called the G. leontopodium, or lion's-paw cudweed, — the Edelweiss of the natives, — whose dense heads are smothered in white silky down. The New Zealand " vegetable sheep " is, therefore, only an extraordinary development of this peculiarity of the tribe even on our own mountains.

There are several curious anomalies in the distribution of Alpine plants, for which no perfectly satisfactory explanation has yet been given. For instance, the genus Dioscorea is pre-eminently tropical, being peculiar to the hottest regions of the old and new worlds, the roots of several members being esculent, and used as culinary vegetables, like potatoes. Strange to say, one species of the family, and only one, is found in Europe, the D. Pyrenaica. which is an Alpine plant recently discovered at a considerable altitude on the Pyrenees. In like manner the genus Pelargonium is peculiarly African and Australian ; and yet a species of it, also an Alpine plant, the P. Endlickeridnum, has been found on the chain of the Taurus in several stations extending from Pamphylia to Armenia 1 . The extraordinary genus Pilostyles, resembling in miniature the gigantic

1 On the Spanish plateau, several of the plants common in the Crimea and in the elevated plains of Asia Minor occur. Geum heterocarpum is found in the mountain regions of South Spain, and of Elborus in Persia. Rhododendron Ponticum, which inhabits the mountains of Asia Minor, occurs on the mountain range of the Sierra de Monchique, in Portugal. The cedar of the Lebanon is supposed to be only a variety of the cedar of the Atlas mountains opposite to Spain. Every botanist is struck with the resemblance in type between the vegetation of the arid elevated tracts of Spain and that of the southern steppes of Russia ; and some species are common to both. The Cynomorium coccineum, growing in the island of Malta, the Fungus Melitensis of the old writers, and supposed to be the celebrated styptic used by the Crusaders to staunch their wounds, extends to the Levant in the East, and to Northern Africa and the Canary islands in the West; in which latter place it is used as food.

I.] PELARGONIUM AND PILOSTYLES. 17

Rafflesia of the Eastern Archipelago — without root, stem, or leaves, and consisting only of a bell-shaped flower sessile on the bark of the tree on which it is a parasite — is peculiar to South America. A species, however, has recently been found in the Alpine regions of Asia Minor, called P. Hausknechtii ; and though so far out of its proper region, it preserves the peculiar habit of the genus. All the species grow T on the bean family ; and, true to its native instinct, this Asiatic rover is confined exclusively to a kind of spiny Astragalus. To account for the presence of this South American plant on the mountains of Asia Minor is one of the knottiest ■ points in geographical botany. We can explain in some measure the occurrence of the African Pelai'gonium on the mountains of Taurus on the same grounds that we can account for the remarkable similarity — the almost identity — of the cedar of the Atlas range and the cedar of Lebanon and of the mountains of Taurus. Great changes of surface in very recent geological times have taken place on the African and Asiatic continents, as is proved by many Mediterranean species of fishes being found in the Red Sea and yet not in the Indian Ocean ; by the fishes of the I salt lakes of Sahara being identical with those of \ the Gulf of Guinea ; and, more extraordinary still, those of the Sea of Galilee with those of the Nile, of the lakes of South-eastern Africa, and the Zambesi. During some one or other of the great changes of sea and land necessary to produce

C this remarkable resemblance between the inhabitants of waters now so remote and isolated, the Pelargonium may have spread from Africa to Asia Minor. The occurrence of the genus in Australia may be owing to the same cause which produced the resemblance between the marsupial animals, and especially the plants, of Europe during the Eocene epoch, and those of Australia at the present day ; a resemblance so striking, that in order to form an idea of the appearance of our country during this geological period we have only to visit our great colony at the Antipodes. The Proteaceae are the characteristic plants of the Eocene period of Europe. They constituted, in that early epoch, the principal part of the scrub vegetation of our continent, as they now form the peculiar clothing of the wastes of Australia. But what is the connexion between the sub-Alpine Pilostyles of Asia Minor and the rest of its family in South America? It has been ascertained that the sub-tropical flora of Europe during the Miocene epoch is largely American and Japanese. Of the Swiss Miocene plants, for instance, no less than 232 species have their nearest allies living in the United States and tropical America, while 108 occur in Asia. In all probability, therefore, the Miocene flora of Europe came from America during the Eocene epoch, across the Atlantic, over a great island-continent then existing, which botanists have called 'Atlantis,' after the ancient legend ; and since the Miocene period, this Amer-

I.] ORIGIN OF HIGHIAND FLORA. 19

ican flora spread from Europe over Asia Minor, Northern Asia, and Japan, in comparatively high latitudes and at considerable elevations, returning to their birthplace by these routes, after having made the circuit of the globe. The present flora of America has descended from these progenitors — the plants of the Eocene and Cretaceous periods of that continent. If we accept this hypothetical Atlantic continent as a scientific fact — established, as it is, by many curious coincidences — it explains to us how there should still be left on the mountains of Asia Minor — like a shell on the shore — a solitary survivor of an ancient American flora identical with the present. The Pilostyles of Asia Minor stands in very much the same relation to the ancient American flora of Europe and Northern Asia, as the one species of myrtle and the one species of laurel now left to us stand to the very large family of myrtles and laurels which spread over Central Europe during the tertiary epoch, and have retreated in these days to the tropical and subtropical countries of the two worlds, where they are as numerous as of old.

But in passing from these interesting speculations in general geographical botany to the consideration of our own Alpine flora, a very interesting question arises, — What is the origin of these plants on the British hills ? We can hardly suppose them to be indigenous ; for they evidently maintain their existence, in the very imited areas to which they are confined, with

C 2 extreme difficulty, and are comparatively few in number, and poor and meagre in appearance. For these reasons we are fairly entitled to conclude that they are members of specific centres beyond their own area ; and these centres must be sought in places where the physical conditions are most favourable for their growth, and where they attain the utmost profusion and luxuriance of which they are constitutionally capable. Now, if we examine the flora of the Lapland and Norwegian mountains, we find that it is not only specifically identical with that of the British Isles, but also that the species of the former are more numerous, and exhibit a greater development of individual forms, than those of the latter, constituting in many places the common continuous vegetation of extensive districts 1 . This fact seems to indicate the Scandinavian mountains as the geographical centres from which we have derived our Alpine plants \ and, as might have been expected, allowing this supposition to be true, their gradual migration southwards may be very distinctly traced, like the descent in after ages of the