330 



one of which is truly a New England plant. It is a rather sin- 

 gular fact that the weeds which grow broadcast around our doors, 

 should be imported ones, and that our native weeds should 

 appear to be confined to unimproved lands. 



There are several plants which I have not mentioned, that are 

 more or less naturalized, but it has been by man's agency, and 

 they are esteemed useful for many purposes. An instance of 

 the way in which many of the common foreign weeds are 

 brought over, came under my notice, in this city. There is a 

 large number of poor Germans located near Roxbury, on Har- 

 rison Avenue, and directly in front of their tenfooters I found, 

 two years ago, a little cluster of Slierardia arvensis, a common 

 German weed, resembling a low Galium. I took it up, root and 

 all, but it died in the rich loam of my garden. I never could 

 find another specimen. The seed had, probably, been shaken 

 out of the luggage they brought with them. 



Mr. Wells said he had often noticed seeds of foreign 

 plants in the rubbish from foreign rags, thrown out near 

 paper-mills. In such places, plants before unknown in the 

 neighborhood, grow up every year. He had observed, for 

 several years, a novel species of gourd growing in the dust 

 heap near a paper-mill, at Springfield, and the same species 

 in a similar position near Fitchburg. 



Mr. Wells exhibited the prepared fibres of several spe- 

 cies of American plants, which had been subjected to a 

 new chemical process, to fit them for manufacturing purpo- 

 ses. The first was a skein of fibres prepared from a single 

 leaf of the Mexican Aloe, Agave Americana, the plant 

 which furnishes the Sisal hemp. The skein was as thick as 

 a man's thumb, and nine feet long. The fibre is the 

 strongest known. The second was a skein of the fibres 

 obtained from the Okra plant, which were six and a half 

 feet long, and prepared in a similar way. He exhi- 

 bited, in contrast, a bunch of flax straw, one end of which 

 was converted into hemp, the whole being less than two 

 feet long. He had been experimenting, for some time, on 



