20 ERYTHEA. 
become in various ways vehicles for the chance introduction 
of foreign plants and weeds into the flora of such country. 
This is a thing which has been repeatedly established by 
authentic record. Nor is it impossible that even the Ameri- 
can buffalo may have been the means of a wider dispersion 
of some species of plants ; and it were to ba wished that Mr. 
Borthoud had been in a position to give us some evidence; 
but I have read this paper again and again in earnest but 
fruitless search for any proof of what he undertook to 
demonstrate. I fear that he did not appreciate the diff- 
culties of the situation before he began to write. If the case 
had been this, that the buffalo had begun to traverse the 
regions in question some ten or twenty or even fifty years 
before the advent of the botanists, then might one with some 
reason look for some exceptional and introduced species 
accomplish in the way of dispersing plants might easily have 
been done several thousands of years before, not Mr. Bert- 
made in far off ages of the past, may well be believed to have 
spread over the whole country, by gradual adaptation to new 
surroundings, if not before Adam’s time, at least before our 
& prairie country;” and 
he gives a list of twenty names of such. This list, if it had 
been definite and correct, would have furnished a problem of 
some sort, though perhaps no very difficult one, and one the 
of the wild animals. But, as a list 
names, this one is so framed as to b 
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