158 BUREAU COUNTY, ILLINOIS. 



have stealthily settled themselves in more places than are gen- 

 erally supposed. 



When I left Western New York thirty years ago this pest 

 was just beginning to attract attention. No one seemed to 

 suspect that his field was to be permanently invaded. I 

 visited that country recently, and found they had swept over 

 the whole land like a tidal wave. They flourished in the 

 lake sands and on the clay bluffs, in door yards, church yards 

 and cemeteries, along the highways, and peeping up between 

 the ties of the railways; and logs or rubbish resting upon 

 the ground are speedily festooned, matted, and buried with 

 their growth. Every neglected spot seemed a nursery for this 

 weed. I asked a farmer if his farm was as badly infected as 

 others ? He replied, " There are but two patches on my farm, 

 one beginning at the north end and reaching south to the cen- 

 ter, the other beginning at the south end and reaching north to 

 the first! " The whole country is so saturated with them that 

 many people there think they grow spontaneously, without 

 seed or germ. My friend was not a swift witness against them, 

 but in the course of conversation he mentioned that on one 

 occasion he prepared a field very nicely for oats. When these 

 were first headed he looked over them with pride, seeing 

 nothing but a waving sea of oats. At harvest he could see 

 nothing but a huge crop of Canada thistles ! It produced 

 about thirty bushels of oats, though my friend confessed that 

 but for the thistles, he would probably have had more than 

 forty. The thistles taxed him more than ten bushels of oats 

 to the acre, besides the cutting, binding, shocking, stacking 

 and threshing of a crop quite as bulky as and far more trouble- 

 some than the real crop. 



Quack grass and white daisies are not so generally distrib- 

 uted, and farmers exempt from them comfort themselves that 

 their thistles were a lesser evil, illustrating Hudibras, — 



We compound the sins we are inclined to, 

 By damning those we have no mind to. 



The science of farming there seems chiefly to be how best 

 to head off Canada thistles. Their crops, tools and methods 



