WINTER BIRDS ABOUT BOSTON. 



A WEED has been defined as a plant the use 

 of which is not yet discovered. If the defini- 

 tion be correct there are few weeds. For the 

 researches of others beside human investigators 

 must be taken into the account. What we com- 

 placently call the world below us is full of in- 

 telligence. Every animal has a lore of its own ; 

 not one of them but is — what the human 

 scholar is more and more coming to be — a spe- 

 cialist. In these days the most eminent bot- 

 anists are not ashamed to compare notes with 

 the insects, since it turns out that these bits of 

 animate wisdom long ago anticipated some of 

 the latest improvements of our modern system- 

 atists.^ We may see the red squirrel eating, 



1 See a letter by Dr. Fritz Miiller, "Butterflies as Botanists : " 

 Nature, vol. xxx. p. 240. Of similar import is the case, cited by 

 Dr. Asa Gray (in the American Journal of Science, November, 

 1884, p. 325), of two species of plantain found in this country, 

 which students have only of late discriminated, although it turns 

 out that the cows have all along known them apart, eating one and 

 declining the other, — the bovine taste being more exact, it would 

 seem, or at any rate more prompt, than the botanist's lens. 



