94 Natural Habitats and Nativeness. 
had been taken some weeks before, a practical farmer exclaimed, 
“T can see this field isa pasture that has been meadowed.” I 
had discovered the fact on entering it from the absence of 
Heracleum and Anthriscus sylvestis in the hedge, and other hay- 
land species on the feeding surface ; but was hardly prepared for 
his immediate reply to my question—‘‘ How do you know?” 
“It is simple enough! From the presence of Cnicus arvensis and 
Cnicus lanceolatus,” he replied. In a word he recognised at once— 
from the agriculturists point of view—that the selection of species 
was artificial, that it was a human product, as much as the wheat 
which grew in the field beyond the fence. Truly natural habitats 
and native floras on the rich soils of Lincolnshire there are none. 
Man with us has shaped the course of nature so long, especially 
since the great inclosure, following on the growth of the turnip 
as a field crop—dating from 1790—that everything has become 
more or less artificial. 
Yet with these definite human characteristics everywhere, 
from the reclaimed silt and drained peat to the highest points of 
the wold and cliff hills, everything is natural enough within cer- 
tain bounds. Man when regarded from the right stand-point is 
no more an excresence and disturber in nature than the placid 
bullocks and quiet sheep, which make the pasture so different 
from the meadow flora by continual grazing. ‘The human species 
causes a little more trouble perhaps in relegating the wider circle 
of its influences into the proper category of more permanent or 
of transitory fluctuations, nothing more. For surely man is as 
natural an influence on our rich soils, as the longwool sheep that 
crops, and thereby changes the herbage of its native hills, or as 
the Peregrine sowing oak, beech, or barley in the ash woods of 
the Liassic clays, from the torn crop of a ring dove, which had 
obtained a full meal on the escarpment of the Wolds. It is all 
very well for the sake of expediency and simplicity to make a 
distinct division, as between the British and South Kensington 
Museums, and to say, ‘‘ Here man and man’s work; there nature 
and nature’s work.” No such distinction exists in reality, nor can 
one be made in botany without violating the first principle of 
true observation, namely, that “ what is found is natural.” 
4 
