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not some obscure inhabitant of one of the back streets of your own 

 town. So, in the case of our present unwelcome visitor, before one 

 can ask the question whence he came, we ought to be satisfied that 

 he really is a stranger. Now, some botanists seem to think he has all 

 along been a native of these islands, but has " made himself so scarce" 

 as not to have been previously recognized by our Botanical Detective 

 Force;* while others pronounce him an unmistakeable foreigner, greedy 

 and rapacious, '" fixin " himself in John Bull's rivers, for all the world 

 as if he had as good a right to occupy them as the aborigines them- 

 selves. For my own part, I have no sort of doubt upon the subject ; 

 I hold, with the watermen, that he is a veritable " foreigner," although 

 I find that the Rev. Mr. Bloxam, who had visited its place of growth, 

 said, in 1848, he " could find no reason to doubt its being a true na- 

 tive ;" and Mr. Kirk, who first regarded it as introduced, afterwards 

 changed his views, and concluded it must be indigenous, " from its 

 simultaneous appearance in so many localities." Whatever Mr. Blox- 

 am's reasons were for his opinion, Mr. Babington appears to have 

 agreed with him at that time. If, however, Mr. Bloxara thought so 

 only because " numbers of other water-plants grew in the same loca- 

 lity," the reasoning is very unsatisfactory, seeing that any introduced 

 water-plant must necessarily be found in company with other water- 

 plants. The other argument, derived from its " simultaneous appear- 

 ance in so many localities," loses much of its force when the numerous 

 localities come to be reduced, as I shall hereafter show, to one, or at 

 most two. I have already stated that the plant was first found in 

 1842, in the loch at Dunse Castle. Now, at first sight one would 

 suppose a quiet lake in Scotland beyond the reach of sophistication ; 

 but Dr. Johnston informs me that aquatic plants had been introduced 

 into that piece of water from the south. Here, then, we have evidence 

 of the probability of the Anacharis being an introduced plant at Dunse. 

 Then we learn that, six years after, it was found in the Whitadder, 

 between the loch at Dunse and the sea ; and now, in August, 1852, 

 Dr. Johnston writes to me thus : — " As with you, so with us, the weed 

 is altering the character of the Whitadder, and will require before 

 long to be dealt with as we have dealt with savages in some places." 

 Its second discovery was in the Foxton Locks, situate on the Union 

 Canal, which connects Market Harborough with Leicester, and the 



* The plant is so unlike any of our British water-plants that it could not possibly 

 have been overlooked. There is but_ one plant, the Potamogeton densus, that could 

 ever be mistaken for it, and this only by the most superficial obserrer. ^ 



