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because of the greater severity of our winters. But chess is not the only- 

 introduced plant which seems to thrive better in the United States than 

 in its native country. The Berberry I noticed in some of the New Eng- 

 land States, especially in the neighborhood of New Haven, much more 

 common and vigorous than I had ever noticed in any district of England 

 or Scotland. Verbascum Tkapsus, the Moth Mullein, is far from being a 

 common plant in England ; I never met with it in quantity except in one 

 or two localities on calcareous soils ; here it grows with extraordinary 

 vigor and seems as intent upon pushing its way westward as man him- 

 self. Erigeron Canadense, known as horse- weed, or butter- weed, is a 

 native of both countries. In England, however, it is confined chiefly to 

 one or two of the south-eastern counties. I never found the plant but 

 in Kew Church yard, where my attention was directed to it by a notice 

 in a London Botanical Journal, the Phytologist ; here it is one of the 

 most abundant and vilest of weeds the farmer has to contend with. We 

 should not be justified then in concluding that chess is more abundant ia 

 the United States than in England owing to the wheat being more injured, 

 by frost, seeing that other plants are similarly aflfected by the diflference 

 in the soil and climate of the two countries. 



3rd. If chess was originally a plant of wheat transformed by the 

 action of frost, or other adverse causes, why are chess plants frequently 

 seen so vigorous by the side of weak plants of wheat, both of which 

 must have been subject to the action of the same external influences? 

 One plant of chess, which I pulled up in the summer of 1850, had for- 

 ty-three stems, yet in the same clump, a wheat plant was growing with 

 only two stems. I omitted to count the seeds of each, but we may pre- 

 sume if the wheat plant yielded sixty grains for one sown, the reproduc- 

 tive powers of the chess plant would have been at a low estimate, seven- 

 teen hundred for one, a somewhat strange result, truly, of the action of 

 adverse influences. 



4th. I have examined crops of wheat, which, in some parts, had been 

 more injured by frost than others, and in these parts the number of chess 

 plants compared with wheat plants, was greater than in other parts of 

 the field, but if a square rod of land had been measured in these differ- 

 ent parts, and the number of chess plants counted in each, my observa- 

 tions lead me to conclude, that there would have been found a nearly- 

 equal number of plants in one as in the other. Chess is obviously a 

 hardier plant than wheat, it is better able to withstand the action of frost; 



