216 On the Persian Cotton Tree. 
of other species was necessary to give a more com- 
plete view of the subject. Linnzus calls it a native 
of America, and there is no doubt but that it is be- 
come so; although there is much more reason to sup- 
pose America naturalized a Persian plant, than that 
Persia got it from the new world: especially if we 
are to credit a paper lately presented, by a British 
merchant, to the Economical Society at Petersburg, 
in which it is positively asserted, that several of the 
European nations furnished their American colonies 
with Persian Cotton-seed, procured at Smyrna. 
Now this fact (if sufficiently authentic, which I do 
not doubt from my knowledge of the veracity of 
the author) will easily account for the G. herba- 
ceum being found wild in America: when we re- 
collect the wonderful provision of nature for the 
wide dispersion of seeds; and Linneus’s assertion, 
that the Erigeron canadense was dispersed from the 
botanic garden of Paris, by the winds, over a great 
part of Europe, and several other plants,* from the 
botanic garden of Upsal, over a whole province. 
My reason for suggesting these doubts, relative 
to the native country of this species of cotton, 
are, that all vegetables of this genus are suppos- 
ed to have been indigenous in Persia exclu- 
sively; and that even the East Indies derived 
* The Antirrhinum minus, the Datura stramonium, 
the Gnaphalium americanum, &c, 
