378 



rived it, I therefore conclude it to be a strictly European species, and 

 as such, and from its known range, likely to belong to our portion of 

 that continent over which we have just seen it is so widely diffused. 

 Furthermore, I find the gooseberry inhabiting the deep recesses of 

 woods and rocky dells, far from the haunts of man and from cultiva- 

 tion. I put these facts together, and think myself justified in drawing 

 from them the inference that the gooseberry is as truly native with us 

 as it is on the continent of Europe, to which quarter of the globe it 

 seems exclusively appropriated. The fact of its being often, and per- 

 haps more commonly than otherwise seen in hedges and other doubt- 

 ful or suspicious places, is surely, taken by itself, no sound argument 

 against the point contended for, because any native plant in such ge- 

 neral cultivation would, as this does, be continually straying beyond 

 the precincts of the garden, and the more readily as being the natu- 

 ral product of the soil and climate.* As for the hackneyed and po- 

 pular mode of accounting for the propagation of this and other sup- 

 posed foreigners through the agency of birds dropping the seed, the 

 argument is not worth refuting, this being one of the many means 

 employed by Nature herself for the dissemination of species the seeds 

 of which are unfurnished with mechanical contrivances for their diffu- 

 sion abroad.f An explanation like the above can only be adverted 

 to in the case of plants which we see springing up around habitations 

 or in decidedly suspicious places ; beyond this it is of no weight or 

 value whatever. I do not, on perusal of the writers of continental 

 floras (an extensive collection of which, old and new, I am much in 

 the habit of consulting), find the same disposition to doubt the origin 

 of species which seem so peculiarly to characterize the botanists of 

 this country, that they must needs have recourse to the hypothetical 



* The genus Ribes belts the whole globe under our own and other temperate pa- 

 rallels, the species only changing with change of climate and longitude. Thus we 

 have R. Grossularia as one appropriated to the woods and rocks of the western extre- 

 mity of the old world. R. nigrum, rubrum and alpinum stretching over the entire 

 continent from Italy to Lapland, and eastward through Siberia to Kamtschatka, R. 

 rubrum extending beyoud Behring's Straits to the extremest arctic lands of America. 

 In the south these species inhabit the mountains or higher grounds, in the north de- 

 scending into the plains, and even in our central Europe are found at slight eleva- 

 tions or at the sea-level, in cold, shady, or damp situations. Crossing the Atlantic, 

 we find under our latitudes in Labrador and Hudson's Bay, the analogues of our 

 black currant and gooseberry in Ribes floridum, Cynosbati and some other American 

 species, which finally give place on the west of the Rocky Mountains to R. sangui- 

 neum and congenerous kinds with large and showy flowers, 



f Phytol. ii. p. 518. 



