8. British and Foreign - Page 2

oyster, a true native.
The common brown rat, for instance, as everybody knows, came over, not,
it is true, with William the Conqueror, but with the Hanoverian dynasty
and King George I. of blessed memory. The familiar cockroach, or 'black
beetle,' of our lower regions, is an Oriental importation of the last
century. The hum of the mosquito is now just beginning to be heard in
the land, especially in some big London hotels. The Colorado beetle is
hourly expected by Cunard steamer. The Canadian roadside erigeron is
well established already in the remoter suburbs; the phylloxera battens
on our hothouse vines; the American river-weed stops the navigation on
our principal canals. The Ganges and the Mississippi have long since
flooded the tawny Thames, as Juvenal's cynical friend declared the
Syrian Orontes had flooded the Tiber. And what has thus been going on
slowly within the memory of the last few generations has been going on
constantly from time immemorial, and peopling Britain in all its parts
with its now existing fauna and flora.

But if all the plants and animals in our islands are thus ultimately
imported, the question naturally arises, What was there in Great Britain
and Ireland before any of their present inhabitants came to inherit
them? The answer is, succinctly, Nothing. Or if this be a little too
extreme, then let us imitate the modesty of Mr. Gilbert's hero and
modify the statement into Hardly anything. In England, as in Northern
Europe generally, modern history begins, not with the reign of Queen
Elizabeth, but with the passing away of the Glacial Epoch. During that
great age of universal ice our Britain, from end to end, was covered at
various times by sea and by glaciers; it resembled on the whole the
cheerful aspect of Spitzbergen or Nova Zembla at the present day. A few
reindeer wandered now and then over its frozen shores; a scanty
vegetation of the correlative reindeer-moss grew with difficulty under
the sheets and drifts of endless snow; a stray walrus or an occasional
seal basked in the chilly sunshine on the ice-bound coast. But during
the greatest extension of the North-European ice-sheet it is probable
that life in London was completely extinct; the metropolitan area did
not even vegetate. Snow and snow and snow and snow was then the short
sum-total of British scenery. Murray's Guides were rendered quite
unnecessary, and penny ices were a drug in the market. England was given
up to one unchanging universal winter.

Slowly, however, times altered, as they are much given to doing; and a
new era dawned upon Britain. The thermometer rose rapidly, or at least
it would have risen, with effusion, if it had yet been invented. The
land emerged from the sea, and southern plants and animals