THISTLES. 101 



THISTLES. 



By GRANT ALLEN. 



THERE is no weed weedier or more ubiquitous than the common 

 thistle. In paradise, it is true, if we may trust John Milton and 

 the Sunday-school books — wise, as usual, beyond what is written — 

 there were no thorns or thistles ; the creation and introduction of the 

 noxious tribe upon this once innocent and thornless earth being a direct 

 consequence of the fall of man, and a stern retribution for Adam's 

 delinquency. But since then the thistle has managed so to diffuse 

 itself over the habitable globe that there hardly now remains a spot 

 on earth without its own local representative of that ever-intrusive 

 and conquering genus. Wherever civilized man goes, there the thistle 

 accompanies him as a matter of course in his various wanderings. It 

 adapts itself to all earthly environments. Close up to the Arctic Circle 

 you find it defying the indigenous reindeer with its prickly wings ; 

 under an equatorial sky you may observe it accommodating itself 

 most complacently with a sardonic smile to tropical existence, and bat- 

 tling with the prickly cactuses and the thorny acacias, to the manner 

 born, for its fair share of the dry and arid uplands. Even nettles are 

 nowhere in competition with it ; in spite of its valuable and irritating 

 sting, the nettle has not the plasticity and adaptability of constitution 

 that mark the stout and sturdy thistle tribe. Garnered and harvested 

 yearly with the farmer's corn, its seeds have been gratuitously dis- 

 tributed by its enemy, man, in all climates ; and, when once it gains 

 the slightest foothold, its winged down enables it to diffuse itself ad 

 infinitum through the virgin soil of yet unconquered and unthistly 

 continents. A field of thistles in England itself is a beautiful sight 

 for the enthusiastic botanist (who has usually a low opinion of the 

 agricultural interest) ; but in the fresh and fallow earth of New Zea- 

 land they attain a yet more prodigious and portentous stature, that 

 might well strike awe and dismay into the stout heart of a Berkshire 

 farmer. 



The fact is, the thistle is one of those bellicose plants which 

 specially lay themselves out, in the struggle for existence, for the 

 occupation of soils where they are compelled to defend their leaves 

 and stems from the constant attacks of the larger herbivores. On 

 open plains and wide steppes, much browsed over in the wild state by 

 deer or buffalo, and in the degenerate civilized condition by more 

 prosaic cows and donkeys, one may always note that only the prick- 

 liest and most defensive plants have any chance of gaining a liveli- 

 hood. Gorse and blackthorn form the central core of the little bushy 

 clumps on our English commons, grown over thickly with bramble 

 and dog-rose, or interspersed every here and there with occasional 



