PESTIFEROUS PLANTS. 225 



or else that those tribunals which do exist be created into an intelli- 

 gible succession, with one of last resort at the top, whose decrees 

 shall be final to protect, as well as to discipline, both the railway 

 company and its customers. 



-- 



PESTIFEROUS PLANTS. 



By Prof. BYRON D. HALSTED, 



BOTANIST OF NEW JERSEY AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE EXPERIMENT STATION. 



SOME plants, naturally, are better fitted to subserve the wants 

 of man than others, and for the growth of these he puts forth 

 special effort ; in short, the whole underlying foundation of mod- 

 ern agriculture rests upon methods of favoring these plants and 

 thereby enlarging and multiplying those qualities in them that 

 led to their being chosen by man as objects of cultural attention. 

 All plants, therefore, that now legitimately occupy space in our 

 fields, orchards, and gardens are living an unnatural life, because 

 they are in part creatures of selection and care ; and it therefore 

 follows that, owing to this stimulus under which they have flour- 

 ished for generations, when the fostering hand of man is with- 

 held they either perish or gradually drift back to the wild state 

 and slowly lose many of their most valuable qualities as culti- 

 vated plants and regain those that better fit them for the stern 

 battle of life. During the time while cultivated plants have been 

 brought to a high plane of usefulness there have been many other 

 species with no merit in their products that have stood in the 

 way of the development of these fostered plants. The weeds have 

 grown strong because obliged to fight their way and take every 

 possible advantage when opportunity offers. They quickly win 

 in the race for supremacy in every field devoted to cultivated 

 crops, when man's care is withheld, and multiply their kind to an 

 extraordinary extent. More reasonable it would be to expect a 

 man under the softening influences of civilized life to win in the 

 rough race for existence when placed, unaided, among savage In- 

 dians, than to hope for the success of a parsnip or onion seedling 

 when surrounded by a rank growth of weeds. 



There is nothing in the structure of a plant that Cain-like 

 curses it forever. No part of the leaf, stem, fruit, or flower gives 

 conclusive evidence that it belongs to a weed, and therefore we 

 are forced back to the definition that was accepted a long time 

 ago, namely, " A weed is a plant out of place." Its relation to 

 others makes a plant a weed. A rose bush of the rarest variety, 

 and one highly prized in its proper place, is a weed when occupy- 

 ing the soil to the detriment of some other plant that has the 



TOL. XLI. 18 



