More Science From an Easy Chair

land if one is a naturalist, and cares for the beauty of Alpine meadows, and of the flowers which grow among and upon the rocks near the great glaciers. This year the weather has, no doub

the day before, it was as hot and brilliant in the valley of Chamonix as it can be. Mont Blanc and the Dome de Goutet stood out clear and imma

emerald and amethystine bands. The huge mountain masses rising with a vast sweep from St. Jingo's shore displayed range after range of bloom-like greys and purples, whilst far away and above delicately glittered-like some incredible vision of a h

buttercup, the Alpine dryad, the Alpine forget-me-nots and pink primroses, the summer crocus, delicate hare-bells, and many other flowers of goodly size were abundant. The grass of Parnassus and the edelweiss were not yet in flower, but lower down the slopes the Alpine rhododendron was showing its crimson bunches of blossom. It is a pity that the Swiss call this plant "Alpenrose," since there is a true and exquisite Alpine rose (which we often found) with deep red flowers, dark-coloured foliage, and a rich, sweet-briar perfume. Lovely as these larger flowers of the higher Alps are, they are excelled in fascination by the delicate blue flowers of the Soldanellas, like little fringed foolscaps, by the brilliant little red and purple Alpine snap-dragon, and by the cushion-forming growths of saxifrages and other minute plants which encrust the rocks and bear, closely set in their compa

al of the fittest-by natural selection. All beauty of living things, it seems, is due to Nature's selection, and not only all beauty of colour and form, but that beauty of behaviour and excellence of inner quality which we call "goodness." The fittest, that which has survived and will survive in the struggle of organic growth, is (we see it in these flowers) in man's estimation the beautiful. Is it possible to doubt that just as we approve and delightedly revel

w many millions of years did it take to form those rocks (many of them are stratified, water-laid deposits) in the depths of the ocean? How many more to twist and bend them and raise them to their present height? And what inconceivably long persistence of the wear and tear of frost and snow and torrent has it required to excavate in their hard bosoms these deep, broad valleys thousands of feet below us, and to leave these strangely moulded mountain peaks still high above us? And that beauty of the sun-lit sky and of the billowy ice-field and of the colours of the lake below and of the luminous haze and the deep blue shade in the valley-how is that related to the beauty of the flowers? Truly enough, it

arly black and the purple orchids, vetches of all colours, the Alpine clover with four or five enormous flowers in a head instead of fifty little ones, the Astrantias (like a circular brooch made up of fifty gems each mounted on a long elastic wire and set vibrating side by side), the sky-blue forget-me-nots, and the golden potentillas, are usually components of the Alpine meadow. At Murren, and no doubt commonly elsewhere, there are a few very beautiful grasses among the flowers, but the most remarkable grass is one (Poa alpina), which has on every spikelet or head a bright green serpent-like streamer. Each of these "streamers" is, in fact, a young grass-plant, budded off "viviparously," as it is called, from the flower-head, or "spikelet," and having nothing to do with the p

orders for it. At last, concealed on a bank in a wood, between Glion and Les Avants, it revealed itself in quantity, many specimens standing over three feet in height. Martagon is an Arabic word, signifying a Turkish cap. A very strange and uncanny-looking lily, which I had never seen before, turned up near Kandersteg at the Blue Lake, beloved of Mr. H. G. Wells. This is "the Herb Paris." It has four narrow outstretched green sepal

s, which English people call by a Portuguese name as soon as they are on the Continent, and singing birds (usually one is too late in the season to hea

y,