Falling in Love, page 119 by Grant Allen
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The history of some of these waifs and strays which go to make up the wider population of Britain is indeed sufficiently remarkable. Like all islands, England has a fragmentary fauna and flora, whose members have often drifted towards it in the most wonderful and varied manner. Sometimes they bear witness to ancient land connections, as in the case of the spotted Portuguese slug which Professor Allman found calmly disporting itself on the basking cliffs in the Killarney district. In former days, when Spain and Ireland joined hands in the middle of the Bay of Biscay, the ancestors of this placid Lusitanian mollusk must have ranged (good word to apply to slugs) from the groves of Cintra to the Cove of Cork. But, as time rolled on, the cruel crawling sea rolled on also, and cut away all the western world from the foot of the Asturias to Macgillicuddy's Reeks. So the spotted slug continued to survive in two distinct and divided bodies, a large one in South-western Europe, and a small isolated colony, all alone by itself, around the Kerry mountains and the Lakes of Killarney. At other times pure accident accounts for the presence of a particular species in the mainlands of Britain. For example, the Bermuda grass-lily, a common American plant, is known in a wild state nowhere in Europe save at a place called Woodford, in county Galway. Nobody ever planted it there; it has simply sprung up from some single seed, carried over, perhaps, on the feet of a bird, or cast ashore by the Gulf Stream on the hospitable coast of Western Ireland. Yet there it has flourished and thriven ever since, a naturalised British subject of undoubted origin, without ever spreading to north or south above a few miles from its adopted habitat.
There are several of these unconscious American importations in various parts of Britain, some of them, no doubt, brought over with seed-corn or among the straw of packing-cases, but others unconnected in any way with human agency, and owing their presence here to natural causes. That prett