FOREIGN PLANTS, HOW INTRODUCED. 67 
fifty species—a natural result of the position of the island as 
the half-way house on the great ocean highway between Europe 
and the East. Humboldt and Bonpland found, among the 
unquestionably indigenous plants of tropical America, mono- 
cotyledons only, all the dicotyledons of those extensive regions 
having been probably introduced after the colonization of the 
New World by Spain. 
The seven hundred new species which have found their way 
to St. Helena within three centuries and a half, were certainly 
not all, or even in the largest proportion, designedly planted 
there by human art, and if we were well acquainted with vege- 
table emigration, we should probably be able to show that man 
has intentionally transferred fewer plants than he has acci- 
dentally introduced into countries foreign to them. After the 
wheat, follow the tares that infest it. The weeds that grow 
among the cereal grains, the pests of the kitchen garden, are 
the same in America asin Europe.* The overturning of a 
wagon, or any of the thousand accidents which befall the 
emigrant in his journey across the Western plains, may scatter 
upon the ground the seeds he designed for his garden, and the 
herbs which fill so important a place in the rustic materia 
medica of the Eastern States, spring up along the prairie paths 
but just opened by the caravan of the settler. + 
tific travellers, as absolutely barren. But after all, it appears to be well 
established that the original flora of St. Helena was extremely limited, though 
now counting hundreds of species. 
* Some years ago I made a collection of weeds in the wheatfields of Upper 
Egypt, and another in the gardens on the Bosphorus. Nearly all the plants 
were identical with those which grow under the same conditions in New 
England. Ido not remember to have seen in America the scarlet wild poppy 
so common in European grainfields. I have heard, however, that it has lately 
crossed the Atlantic, and Iam not sorry for it. With our abundant harvests 
of wheat, we can well afford to pay now and then a loaf of bread for the 
cheerful radiance of this brilliant flower. 
+ Josselyn, who wrote about fifty years after the foundation of the first 
British colony in New England, says that the settlers at Plymouth had ob- 
served more than twenty English plants springing up spontaneously near their 
improvements. 
