INTRODUCTION OF FOREIGN PLANTS. 69 
driven, sometimes many days’ journey, to mountain pastures. 
Their coats and fleeces transport seeds in both directions. 
Hence we see Alpine plants in champaign districts, the plants 
of the plains on the borders of the glaciers, though in neither 
case do these vegetables ripen their seeds and propagate them- 
selves. This explains the occurrence of tufts of common red 
clover with pallid and sickly flowers, on the flanks of the Alps 
at heights exceeding seven thousand feet. 
The hortus siccus of a botanist may accidentally sow seeds 
from the foot of the Himalayas on the plains that skirt the 
Alps; and it is a fact of very familiar observation, that exotics, 
transplanted to foreign climates suited to their growth, often 
escape from the flower garden and naturalize themselves among 
the spontaneous vegetation of the pastures. When the cases 
containing the artistic treasures of Thorvaldsen were opened 
in the court of the museum where they are deposited, the 
straw and grass employed in packing them were scattered upon 
the ground, and the next season there sprang up from the 
seeds no less than twenty-five species of plants belonging to 
the Roman campagna, some of which were preserved and cul- 
tivated as a new tribute to the memory of the great Scandi- 
nayian sculptor, and at least four are said to have spontaneously 
naturalized themselves about Copenhagen.* The Turkish 
armies, in their incursions into Europe, brought Eastern vege- 
tables in their train, and left the seeds of Oriental wall plants 
to grow upon the ramparts of Buda and Vienna.t In the 
campaign of 1814, the Russian troops brought, in the stuffing 
of their saddles and by other accidental means, seeds from the 
banks of the Dnieper to the valley of the Rhine, and even 
introduced the plants of the steppes into the environs of Paris. 
The forage imported for the French army in the war of 
* VAUPELL, Bégens Indvandring i de Danske Skove, p. 2. 
+ i believe it is certain that the Turks introduced tobacco into Hungary, 
and probable that they in some measure compensated the injury by intro- 
ducing maize also, which, as well as tobacco, has been claimed as Hungarian by 
patriotic Magyars. 
