140 Rhodora [Jurv 
already somewhat familiar with the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Winter 
quarters were established in 1535 near the present site of Quebec; 
and from this time the banks of the lower St. Lawrence were more 
and more visited by Europeans. At the end of the sixteenth century 
Newfoundland was already the scene of extensive fishing operations ; 
and in a single season its waters were visited by three or four hun- 
dred fishing vessels, and more than a hundred habitations were built 
upon the island. Prior to 1600 the French had carried on explora- 
tions along the St. Lawrence ; and from the days of their earliest 
settlements the Jesuit missionaries rapidly pushed into the entire 
country from Labrador, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia west to the 
Great Lakes. They early spread from the St. Lawrence through the 
northern wilderness to Lakes St. John and Mistassini and to Hudson 
Bay; and they very soon made their way to the Indian villages on the 
St. John, the Penobscot and the Kennebec. 
Coming as they did from a thickly populated section of Europe 
where the campion, the mugwort, the field sow-thistle and the hawk- 
weed are common plants — and it should be noted that the seeds of 
all these plants are provided with means for clinging to garments or 
anything with which they are brought in contact — it would be a most 
natural thing for the French, consciously or unconsciously, to bring 
with them a few seeds of these species. It would further surprise no 
one, who has seen the campion overrun the fields about Boston and Cam- 
bridge, that these plants should soon have established themselves along 
the St. Lawrence, whose current would greatly increase the rapidity with 
which they spread along its shores. And then it is certainly probable 
that, in their extensive travels from Quebec through to the northern 
country, or south into New Brunswick, Maine, or Vermont, the Jesuits 
carried with them a few clinging seeds of these plants. The singular 
point is that the campion and the mugwort do not grow in abundance 
on the shores of the Penobscot and the Kennebec; though on the 
latter river there is a small patch of campion on a gravelly bank at 
Carritunk, forty miles above the old Indian village at Norridgewock, 
where Sebastian Ràle so long had his ill-fated mission, but there it is 
evidently of recent introduction. ‘This absence of the plants from the 
Penobscot and Kennebec shores may be due to the fact that, though 
the Jesuits came through from the St. Lawrence to these waters, the 
seed, which at first would have adhered to their clothing or rough 
blankets, would have been thoroughly brushed off after a few days 
