Fifteen years
have I been puzzling at the same questions and have only guessed at a
few of the answers. What sawed out the edges of the moors into long
narrow banks of gravel? What cut them off all flat atop? What makes
Erica Tetralix grow in one soil, and the bracken in another? How did
three species of Club-moss--one of them quite an Alpine one--get down
here, all the way from Wales perhaps, upon this isolated patch of
gravel? Why did that one patch of Carex arenaria settle in the only
square yard for miles and miles which bore sufficient resemblance to
its native sandhill by the seashore, to make it comfortable? Why did
Myosurus minimus, which I had hunted for in vain for fourteen years,
appear by dozens in the fifteenth, upon a new-made bank, which had
been for at least two hundred years a farm-yard gateway? Why does it
generally rain here from the south-west, not when the barometer
falls, but when it begins to rise again? Why--why is everything,
which lies under my feet all day long? I don't know; and you can't
tell me. And till I have found out, I cannot complain of monotony,
with still undiscovered puzzles waiting to be explained, and so to
create novelty at every turn.
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