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Belladonna has never fairly taken root in English soil. It remains, like the Roman snail and the Portuguese slug, a mere casual straggler about its ancient haunts. But there are other plants which have fairly established their claim to be considered as native-born Britons, though they came to us at first as aliens and colonists from foreign parts. Such, to take a single case, is the history of the common alexanders, now a familiar weed around villages and farmyards, but only introduced into England as a pot-herb about the eighth or ninth century. It was long grown in cottage gardens for table purposes, but has for ages been superseded in that way by celery. Nevertheless, it continues to grow all about our lanes and hedges, side by side with another quaintly-named plant, bishop-weed or gout-weed, whose very titles in themselves bear curious witness to its original uses in this isle of Britain. I don’t know why, but it is an historical fact that the early prelates of the English Church, saintly or otherwise, were peculiarly liable to that very episcopal disease, the gout. Whether their frequent fasting produced this effect; whether, as they themselves piously alleged, it was due to constant kneeling on the cold stones of churches; or whether, as their enemies rather insinuated, it was due in greater measure to the excellent wines presented to them by their Italian confreres, is a minute question to be decided by Mr. Freeman, not by the present humble inquirer. But the fact remains that bishops and gout got indelibly associated in the public mind; that the episcopal toes were looked upon as especially subject to that insidious disease up to the very end of the last century; and that they do say the bishops even now–but I refrain from the commission of scandalum magnatum. Anyhow, this particular weed was held to be a specific for the bishop’s evil; and, being introduced and cultivated for the purpose, it came to be known indifferently to herbalists as bishop-weed and gout-weed. It has now long since ceased to be a recognised member of the British Pharmacopoeia, but, having overrun our lanes and thickets in its flush period, it remains to this day a visible botanical and etymological memento of the past twinges of episcopal remorse.

Taken as a whole, one may fairly say that the total population of the British Isles consists mainly of three great elements. The first and oldest–the only one with any real claim to be considered as truly native–is the cold Northern, Alpine and Arctic element, comprising such animals as the white hare of Scotland, the ptarmigan, the pine marten, and the capercailzie–the last once extinct, and now reintroduced into the Highlands as a game bird. This very ancient fauna and flora, left behind soon after the Glacial Epoch, and perhaps in part a relic of the type which still struggled on in favoured spots during that terrible period of universal ice and snow, now survives for the most part only in the extreme north and on the highest and chilliest mountain-tops, where it has gradually been driven, like tourists in August, by the increasing warmth and sultriness of the southern lowlands. The summits of the principal Scotch hills are occupied by many Arctic plants, now slowly dying out, but lingering yet as last relics of that old native British flora. The Alpine milk vetch thus loiters among the rocks of Braemar and Clova; the Arctic brook-saxifrage flowers but sparingly near the summit of Ben Lawers, Ben Nevis, and Lochnagar; its still more northern ally, the drooping saxifrage, is now extinct in all Britain, save on a single snowy Scotch height, where it now rarely blossoms, and will soon become altogether obsolete. There are other northern plants of this first and oldest British type, like the Ural oxytrope, the cloudberry, and the white dryas, which remain as yet even in the moors of Yorkshire, or over considerable tracts in the Scotch Highlands; there are others restricted to a single spot among the Welsh hills, an isolated skerry among the outer Hebrides, or a solitary summit in the Lake District. But wherever they linger, these true-born Britons of the old rock are now but strangers and outcasts in the land; the intrusive foreigner has driven them to die on the cold mountain-tops, as the Celt drove the Mongolian to the hills, and the Saxon, in turn, has driven the Celt to the Highlands and the islands. 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.