74 THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 



Among these is the common plantain, which the Indians 

 called "white man's foot," because it followed so closely in 

 his track. Daisies, dandelions, and buttercups too, have all 

 come to our shores with the tide of human immigration from 

 the Old World, the last named being one and the same with 

 the king cups of the poet Spenser and Izaak Walton. Wild 

 carrot too, that ubiquitous weed of neglected fields, is from 

 abroad. There two or three centuries ago it was moving in 

 aristocratic circles, its fernlike foliage being popular with 

 ladies of kings' courts as an adornment. The memory of that 

 high estate still lingers in another of the plant's common names 

 — Queen Anne's lace. 



Another foreigner all too common in our fields is the 

 black-dotted, yellow-flowered St. John's wort, which has come 

 to us clothed in Old World superstition. It is one of those 

 plants which in the Middle Ages were sacred to John the Bap- 

 tist, and in monkish Latin was called fuga daemonum — "de- 

 mon's flight." On every St. John's Eve (June 23) it was cus- 

 tomary for the people to go to the hills and fields to gather it 

 and hang it in their windows to put evil spirits to flight and as 

 "a preservative against thunder." 



Bouncing Bet, also an immigrant, has found its way into 

 our fields by way of the garden. Our great-great-grand- 

 mothers cherished it as a garden flower, and its seeds doubtless 

 came over in the same neat packets that guarded seeds of the 

 larkspur and hollyhocks, the sweet-williams and pansies and 

 l)inks that went to the making of those delightful old-fash- 

 ioned gardens that were to them a sweet and continuing re- 

 minder of their old home. Tired by and by of the restraint of 

 garden life. Bouncing Bet escaped to the fields and lanes, where 

 we now most frequently find it gay and sunny as ever. 



Mulleins and butter-and-eggs and pussy's favorite flower 

 the catnip, the mints of the tinkling meadow runnels and those 

 round, soft cushions of wild thyme that cover the hills where 



