288 VITALITY OF SEEDS. 



small sylvan plants, too deeply buried, by successive layers of 

 forest foliage and the mould resulting from its decomposition, 

 to be readied by tlie plougli when the trees are gone and the 

 ground brought imder cultivation, may, if a wiser posterity re- 

 plants the wood which sheltered their parent stems, germinate 

 and grow, after lying for generations in a state of suspended ani- 

 mation.* 



Darwin says : " On tlie estate of a relation there was a large 

 and extremely barren heath, which had never been touched by 

 the hand of man, but several hundi'ed acres of exactly the same 

 nature had been enclosed twenty-five years previously and planted 

 with Scotch fir. The change in the native vegetation of the planted 

 part of the heath was most remarkable — more than is generally 

 seen in passing from one quite different soil to another ; not only 

 the proportional numbers of the heath-plants were whoUy changed, 

 but twelve sjpecies of plants (not counting grasses and sedges) flour- 

 ished in the plantation which could not be found on the heath." f 

 Had the author informed us that these twelve plants belonged to 

 species whose seeds enter into the nutriment of the birds which 

 appeared with the young wood, we could easily account for their 

 presence in the soil ; but he says distinctly that the birds were of 

 insectivorous species, and it therefore seems more probable that 

 the seeds had been deposited when an ancient forest protected the 

 growth of the plants which bore them, and that they sprang up 

 to new life when a return of favorable conditions awaked them 

 from a sleep of centuries. Darwia indeed says that the heath 

 " had never been touched by the hand of man." Perhaps not, 



* The mines of Laurium, wliich gave rise recently to such lively diplomatic 

 discussion, are generally known to be largely incumbered with scoriae, proceed- 

 ing from the working of the ancient Greeks, but stiD containing enough of 

 silver to repay extraction by the improved modern methods. Prof. Hendreich 

 relates, according to L' Union MedicaU, that under these scoriae, for at least 

 1,500 years, has slept the seed of a poppy of the species Olaudum. After the 

 refuse had been removed to the furnaces, from the whole space which they 

 had covered have sprung up and flowered the pretty yellow corollas of this 

 flower, which was unknown to modern science, but is described by Pliny and 

 Dioscorides. This flower had disappeared for fifteen to twenty centuries, and 

 its reproduction at this interval is a fact parallel to the fertility of the famom 

 " mummy wheat." — London Medical Record. 



\ Origin of Species, American ed., p. 69. 



